Death on the Hellships. Gregory F. Michno
Australians survived. Either they all went down with the explosion and crush of water or those who escaped were abandoned by the Japanese in their lifeboats. The relatives of the men of Lark Force perhaps endured more anguish than any, having to wait almost four years before being informed by the Japanese what had happened to the men taken prisoner in Rabaul. Montevideo Maru was the first hellship loaded with POWs to be sunk by a U.S. submarine. It would not be the last.30
Lark Force soldiers had been separated from their officers in Rabaul. Whether this was because the Japanese feared a mutiny is unknown. In any event, on 6 July, six days after their men were already dead, sixty officers under Colonel Scanlan, six Australian military nurses, and thirteen female Australian civilians were taken to Simpson Harbor. They boarded the Naruto Maru, a 7,148-ton passenger ship built in 1934, now serving as an ammunition supply ship. The only concession to privacy was a rope across one hold, separating male from female quarters. One nurse called it “a dirty old freighter” and said, “We were all mixed together and spent nine days sweating and starving before we reached Japan.” The convoy reached Yokohama on 15 July. The Aussie officers ended up at Zentsuji Camp, the women at Totsuka. They all survived the war. The Japanese destroyer Akikaze was a convoy escort as far as Saipan, where she was detached and returned to Rabaul via Truk. Akikaze would herself be involved in an incident resulting in a prisoner massacre the following year.31
CAPTURE OF THE PHILIPPINES
In December 1941, the Japanese landed on Luzon, the main northern island of the Philippines. Unlike Japan’s other conquests in Southeast Asia and the East Indies, the Philippines proved a tougher nut to crack. Several landings were made between the tenth and twenty-fourth of the month, at Aparri, Vigan, Legaspi, and Lamon Bay, but the main force boiled ashore in Lingayen Gulf. The Japanese 16th and 48th Divisions and supporting elements pushed rapidly inland, racing south down the central valley for Manila. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s troops fought holding actions while other elements, including soldiers, sailors, civilians, and Filipinos, fell back to defend the Bataan Peninsula. As in the Malayan campaign, the Allied force was pushed back by a Japanese force inferior in numbers. The Japanese were doing so well that, against the protests of Gen. Homma Masaharu, the 48th Division was recalled to prepare for the East Indies operation. Once the U.S.-Filipino army caught its breath and consolidated, however, the Japanese were stymied. They battered themselves against a series of defensive lines stretched across the Bataan Peninsula. By mid-February, battle casualties, disease, and short supplies forced a temporary end to offensive operations. Both sides waited.
By early March, elements of the Japanese 4th and 21st Divisions had arrived to renew the battle. Ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt to vacate the Philippines, MacArthur left by PT boat on 11 March, leaving newly promoted Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright in charge. To many of those left behind, “Dugout Doug” MacArthur had fled, leaving them holding the bag. The remnants of the U.S. 11th, 21st, 31st, 41st, 51st, 71st, and 91st Divisions would fight on, without additional supplies or reinforcements.
The end on Bataan came on 9 April, more the result of a lack of food, medicine, and supplies than Japanese assaults. Unable to continue the struggle, Gen. Edward P. King Jr. called it off. Some men were struck by the date; the last time a U.S. army had surrendered was also on 9 April, when Robert E. Lee did so at Appomattox in 1865.
Still holding out on the island of Corregidor were Wainwright’s eleven thousand men of the 31st Division, 4th Marine Regiment, and soldiers of various units that had managed to get ashore from Bataan. They fought for twenty-seven more days, until the Japanese landed on the island and Wainwright, facing the annihilation of his entire command, went to see General Homma.32
Those who surrendered on Bataan suffered through the hell of the Death March. The Japanese had plans for taking prisoners, but they were based on faulty assumptions. First, they assumed that the prisoners would be in good physical condition, which they were not. There was no plan for caring for sick, hungry, and wounded men. Second was the assumption that their own food supplies and logistical planning would be up to the task, which it was not. Third, the Japanese assumed they might have to transfer twenty-five thousand captives to POW camps. Their estimate was far from accurate.
About ten thousand Americans and sixty-two thousand Filipinos were forced to walk sixty miles up the Bataan Peninsula and east to the railhead at San Fernando. They then rode in boxcars for twenty miles, finally marching an additional ten miles to Camp O’Donnell. Along the way they were subjected to countless robberies, brutalities, and killings. Many Filipinos were able to escape from the columns, darting into the jungles and villages, relatively safe among their own people. Even so, perhaps five thousand Filipinos and seven hundred Americans died before reaching the camp. But O’Donnell was no haven, for even more were to die there in the upcoming months from disease, starvation, and beatings.
The soldiers and marines who surrendered on Corregidor did not suffer the same death march, and their casualties were less horrific. There were other prison camps on Luzon, among them Cabanatuan, Tarlac, Las Pinas, Nichols Field, Pasay, Fort McKinley, and Bilibid Prison. Civilian internment centers were opened at Santo Tomas, Camp John Hay, and Los Banos, among other sites, containing about seventy-eight hundred men, women, and children.33
PRISONER MOVES FROM THE PHILIPPINES
Other than on Luzon, the main strength of the U.S.-Filipino force was on Mindanao. Brig. Gen. William F. Sharp commanded the 61st, 81st, and 101st Divisions, composed almost entirely of Filipino troops. Their surrender came on 8 May, two days after Wainwright’s. Many of the Filipinos were able to melt back into the countryside, whereas the Americans were imprisoned at Del Monte, on the north coast, or at Malabalay, in Mindanao’s central valley.34
Almost immediately the Japanese began moving prisoners among the islands. At Camp O’Donnell in July, groups of volunteers were asked to move to several Philippine islands. Many grasped the chance, willing to try anything to get out of the O’Donnell hellhole. One group included Sidney Stewart, a peculiar sort of soldier who became ill every time he saw blood or saw someone get hurt. Stewart found himself on a small interisland steamer with a few hundred others, traveling from Manila to Cebu City, to Zamboanga on Mindanao’s southwest peninsula, then to Davao. Conditions on the steamer were much better than in the camp. There was sufficient food, and the guards even joked and laughed. In the ports, they allowed Filipinos to throw fruit to them. They disembarked at Davao and were trucked north to the former Davao Penal Colony, whose criminal occupants had been sent to the leper colony on the island of Palawan. During the following weeks, Army Air Corps arrivals from Del Monte swelled the prison camp’s numbers.
The island of Luzon, showing the route of the Bataan Death March and prison and internment centers, 1942–45.
In July, Camp O’Donnell was closed down and most of the prisoners were removed to one of the Cabanatuan camps. On 24 July, another call for men was made, and 346 prisoners from Cabanatuan were selected. They traveled, a hundred men to a rail car, to Bilibid Prison, and from there to the famous million-dollar Pier Seven on the Manila waterfront. On the twenty-ninth, they boarded the Sanko Maru, a 5,461-ton turbine steamer built in 1939. The entire party was quartered in one hold, where the interpreter told them they were going on a “three-month detail,” they would be fed “American food,” and things “would be very enjoyable.”
Among them was 4th Marine Sgt. Donald H. Thomas, who was captured at Corregidor and had spent the previous few months in Bilibid Prison. Thomas called the steamer a “middle-sized freighter, hauling supplies and Jap soldiers.” Generally a man did not take many trips on a prison ship, but Thomas called it “one of the best prison ships I was on.” The voyage was uneventful, and the prisoners even had the freedom to roam the vessel. The steamer made the 350-mile trip to Palawan, stopped at a leper colony, and docked at Puerto Princesa on 1 August.
Making the journey was PO Henry Clay Henderson, who had been aboard the sub tender Canopus and was left to fight on Corregidor after the tender had been bombed and scuttled. Henderson said they were