Revisionism Related to the Bataan 'Death March' of 1942
Inquiring Minds Would Like to Know why the USG censored witnesses for decades... also why do Atrocity Stories Always Play Weird Numbers and Legal Games...
America loves its veterans.
It’s been a meme for years. It’s been true for much longer.
Hollywood even made a movie out of the meme, 2017’s “Thank you for your Service”
In case anyone’s not paying attention, America loves its troops.
And they especially love their combat troops. Wounded combat troops is about as socially praised and elevated in American society as one can get.
This may be an overreaction to the claim that Vietnam veterans were spit upon and mistreated after their return from deployment. But whatever the case, it’s certainly true that veteran status confers a higher moral plane than simply being an average citizen.
This feels like an appropriate moment to reference Starship Troopers once again:
In any case, the pinnacle of the small category of wounded combat veterans are certainly the World War II veterans. WW2 vets are fighting America’s noblest cause with the human material from “the greatest generation.” It’s like a nationalistic double-whammy: the great generation fighting the greatest war against the evilest of opponents.
A triple whammy?
One of the greatest, if not the greatest, war crime committed against American troops during the second World War was the infamous Bataan Death March. It’s a unique mass-scale war crime against American troops during a war.
The Bataan Death March was the forced march of American POW’s from the Philippines from April 9-17, 1942. 75,000 troops were marched 65 miles over 8 days. Modern estimates say somewhere between 5,000-18,000 Filipino soldiers, and 500-650 American soldiers, died along the way due to mistreatment, abuse, and wanton murder.
The POW’s were being marched from their surrenders at Bataan in April, and Corregidor in May, to the POW camp Camp O’Donnell. The rocky island of Corregidor was key to the defense of Manila Bay, and the other remaining Allied troops were nearby in the province of Bataan.
Bataan fell to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. The final Allied troops under General Jonathan M. Wainwright at Corregidor surrendered on May 6, 1942.
General Wainwright would end up being the most senior POW for the duration of the war. Wainwright was MacArthur’s deputy, taking command when MacArthur fled the Philippines. His captivity lasted from May 6, 1942 through August 15, 1945. General Wainwright spent 3 years, 3 months, and 9 days in Japanese captivity, or 1,197 days.
Oddly, at this death, MacArthur notably missed Wainwright’s funeral for ‘business.’
Incidentally, the final messages out of Corregidor were sent by Irving Strober, who died in 1996.
The messages weren’t exactly the inspiring stuff of a Patton speech:
What’s interesting about Strober, is that of course he spins the facts most favorable to himself in the newspaper article. But there’s something missing.
Then when you see what he wrote in desperation, it seems a little more understandable.
But then, sometimes you realize that reality is often a degree worse than even the first layer of critique. The significant different between mainstream history and alternative history and real history, are rarely so clear.
Here’s the actual Strober near-final messages, again from Toland, “But Not in Shame” page 347:
The truly final messages out of Corregidor were pretty pathetic and pedestrian: tell my mama I loved her…
I mean, sure, there are worse words to go out on. But it’s not like we’re Oliver Hazard Perry here. The way this is framed by mainstream historians is dishonest.
In case you were curious, here’s 605 Barbey Street in Brooklyn:
The stories from the forced march were so horrible, that even today the incident is considered uniquely awful.
But the details of the April 1942 march weren’t revealed to the American public until January of 1944, nearly two years later.
Here’s the Friday teaser to the Sunday exclusive in the January 28, 1944 Dayton Herald:
The screencap is small so let me highlight a few key phrases and words: “cloaked in censorship for five months” and “greatest story of the war.”
In case you’re wondering when the Philippines were liberated, it was begun on October 20, 1944 and lasted through August 15, 1945. The captured General Jonathan Wainwright IV wasn’t rescued until the end of the war on August 15th, when he was liberated by Soviet troops in China.
The famous picture of MacArthur returning to the Philippines in the Leyte Gulf was on October 20, 1944:
In case you ever visit, there’s a statue of the landing party on the beachsite.
I recall in the early days of the internet, a college history professor of mine dismissing the iconic landing and its relevance by quickly throwing out these whiny complaints: 1) it was staged, 2) by his own photographers, 3) on a later date than the landing dates, 4) in a non-combat zone, 5) simply for the press and PR. On top of it all, they said, he chose the beach for a wet landing when it was just as easy to come to port and stay dry.
Think of the laundry girls after all!
This is the kind of shittiness that every college student lives by, where left-wing academics get to run their mouth and implant purposeful misinformation and disinformation, in addition to their standard trick of just ignoring epic moments in general. It turns out that all of their complaints about this moment are complete horseshit, but persist anyway.
Anyway, back to the death march…
So from the period of May 6, 1942 through January 28, 1944, the censors kept the story of the Bataan Death March secret. One wonders what the rationale could be.
The first announcement of the death march was in the newspapers in late January 1944, but a big expose in Life Magazine on February 7, 1944 followed shortly thereafter. Life Magazine’s 1936-1972 digital archive is available for free here.
Here’s the first page of the article that set the narrative on the story. I’ve posted the entire article at the end of this post.
The opening paragraphs on the story are… weird.
Let’s recap for the TL;DR:
1) the story was written by escaping POWs,
2) which was cleared by the Secretary of the Navy and the President, and then,
3) Released after the military approved,
4) Representing a “major change in information policy for the British and American Governments” and
5) All film rights are held by the soldiers involved.
Most stories don’t include a convoluted explanation of the present and past government censorship.
I can’t remember another atrocity story where, in the third paragraph of the initial release, they’re discussing how they plan to handle the film rights to the story.
Various interpretations and justifications for wartime censorship I’ve heard in this respect, that would potentially explain why the Defense Department would do this in this situation would be:
RAGE CONTAINMENT: It prevented the American people from becoming too bloodthirsty.
MILITARY SECRECY: It prevented the enemy from knowing what we knew, so it helped facilitate better military operations.
PROTECTING POW’S: It was to protect the POW’s from Japanese retribution or mistreatment.
MORALE: Suppressing the story was necessary for the public not to lose hope or to change their minds about the war.
From the surrender at Corregidor to the publication in the news, this story was suppressed for 1 year, 8 months, 22 days during the war. It’d be slightly longer if you consider the death march was a month prior to the American surrender.
If you consider the justifications for censorship against the three interests I’ve identified above, the rationale for the secrecy doesn’t make much sense.
PROBLEM 1: The Censorship Motive Doesn’t Make Sense
Let’s consider this problem 1 with the official narrative: the purpose of the wartime censorship just doesn’t make sense.
Inflaming the public and troops was almost the purpose of the story as told, so it can’t be about rage containment. There’s no military secrecy interest in POW’s who had since been moved elsewhere, many to Manchuria near China. Can we really say it was motivated to protect POW’s when the story is about the murder of POW’s? And was the public’s morale to recapture American POW’s ever in doubt? It all seems very unlikely.
For some context, the Los Angeles Times was featuring a variety of teaser stories on January 28, 1944. Here’s the page for their coverage that day.
The story lacks a lot of subtlety.
And according to Life, it was told by U.S. soldiers who escaped as P.O.W.’s: Commander Melvyn Harvey McCoy (1907-1988) and Lt. Col. Stephen Michael Mellnik (1907-1994).
Yet those two also published “Ten Escape from Tojo” in September 1943, four months prior.
The names of the actual ten who escaped, were: Lieutenant Commander (now Commander) Melvin H. McCoy, USN, Annapolis '27; Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) Stephen S. Mellnik, Coast Artillery, West Point '32; three Air Corps officers, Captain W. E. Dyess and Second Lieutenants L. A. Boelens and Samuel Grashio; three Marine Corps officers, Captain A. C. Shofner and First Lieutenants Jack Hawkins and Michael Dobervich; and two Army sergeants, R. B. Spielman and Paul Marshall.
The TL:DR; is that they built up trust with the Japanese guards, took broken tools and switched them out for working ones, and used those tools to fashion and prep for an escape. One day when they had built trust with the guards, and they permitted them free movement, they marched into the jungle and marched across the island of Mindanao.
There’s this unfortunate tendency among WW2 vets to appropriate false glory, what we might today call “stolen valor,” from famous stories. And certainly every generation has its embellishers. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here, but… I’m getting a weird sense of the story’s historicity.
PROBLEM 2: The Death Estimates Vary Widely, and Today are Very Low Comparatively
Problem 2 with the official narrative: the original death estimates for American losses were 10-15x what the commonly-accepted current numbers are.
You would expect credible atrocities to grow with time, as more horrors are revealed. You would expect low credibility atrocity propaganda to lessen their death totals over time, as the lies are peeled away.
The “Death March” has seen its numbers dramatically reduced over time.
Here’s the current mainstream narrative of 500-650 American deaths at Wikipedia:
This contrasts with the original framing of the release which cited to 5,200 or 7,500 American deaths.
Here’s the relevant part of the 2/7/44 Life Magazine article about the Bataan Death March citing to 5,200 American deaths. Notably this is a full year and a half before the end of the war and the imprisonment of these P.O.W.’s
Now, for sure, we can chalk some of this up to ‘the fog of war’ and perhaps a desire to overstate these things for propaganda purposes, and also just simply bad information collection at the time.
Noted author John Toland estimated in 1961 that the total American deaths along the march was 2,300 and the Filipino deaths were 12,000-18,000. But he notes that this is from basically averaging survivor statements.
Here’s a run-of-the-mill New Mexico newspaper in 1990 citing to 10,000 American deaths and 70,000 Americans forced to be on the infamous march. Numbers that are wildly wrong.
When the U.S. executed the Japanese Commander, Gen. Masaharu Homma they held responsible for the death march on April 3, 1946, the Associated Press cited to 17,200 dead Americans and Filipinos in total. The media enjoyed bragging about how they captured him by playing on his vanity, the futility of his wife and daughter begging for his life because he was a peaceful man, and the fact he cried during his wife’s testimony at trial saying he was a good man.
Just to be absolutely clear here, he was indicted, found guilty, and executed for 67,000 deaths which included both Filipinos and Americans.
The current estimates are: 5,000 to 18,000 Filipino deaths and 500 to 650 American deaths during the march.
PROBLEM 3: The Trial of General Homma was a Show Trial and a Farce
The third problem is that General Homma’s trial was a farce, by design.
Homma received what we would call in modern times, “Due Process” violations, meaning that the courts had just the appearance of legal process but, in actuality, was an arbitrary tribunal.
Here are a few of those key due process violations:
The use of hearsay evidence.
The use of coerced confessions, aka tortured confessions.
Total disparity in resources available to the prosecution vs. the defense.
Appeals denied for flimsy reasons, a denial of appellate review over the injustices in his case.
Homma’s appointed defense counsels were inexperienced, his prosecutors were seasoned lawyers.
When you have sitting members of the U.S. Supreme Court referring to the trial of a defeated Japanese General as a “blood purge” and a “judicial lynching” you know that, well, there might be some problems with the case.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, in a dissent to Homma’s request for a hearing related to the admission of evidence in his trial, referred to the 1946 Homma trial as akin to a “revengeful blood purge.”
The hearing procedure also admitted hearsay and broad ranges of evidence that wouldn’t normally be admissible because they are not reliable. The judges were only to review the ‘truth or falsity’ of confessions submitted to the court, not whether or not the confessions were voluntarily obtained. The Court’s procedures anticipated the wide admission of coerced confessions, aka tortured confessions.
Why would you need to use coerced confessions to get admissions about an obvious war crime where there were plenty of surviving American POW’s?
Justice Murphy called Homma’s trial a “judicial lynching.” Justice Rutledge, in a dissent, notes that Homma’s defense was given 15 days from arraignment to trial over Christmas, and no longer. By contrast, even simple misdemeanors in America are never prosecuted with such speed today, taking an average of 193 days to resolve a misdemeanor case and 256 to resolve felony cases.
It seems almost petty to note that allegedly none of Homma’s defense counsel had any experience with criminal defense prior to being assigned to his case, lol.
His MacArthur-appointed chief defense counsel, 30 year old Major John H. Skeen Jr. (1915-1987), was fresh out of law school and had no legal experience whatsoever.
The fix was in!
The speed at which the trial occurred also indicates that the process was manifestly unjust.
Arraignment: Dec. 19, 1945 [1]
Trial: January 3, 1946
Execution: April 3, 1946
If you compare the prosecution team to the defense, you can quickly notice a disparity between the two. The prosecutors were real attorneys, and the defense were for show. The lead defense counsel had zero legal experience, and allegedly none of the defense counsel had any kind of criminal defense experience.
Homma’s five prosecutors:
Lt. Col. Frank Edwin Meek Sr., of Caldwell, ID, Chief Prosecutor (1892-1964)
Maj./Col./Lt. Col. Manuel Lim - Filipino
Lt./Cpt. Abram Raff, of Brooklyn, NY (1908-1983)
Cpt. Delmas C. Hill, of Wamego, KS, former Asst. US Attorney (1906-1989)
Lt. Benjamin F. Schwartz, of Los Angeles, CA (1910-1990)
Average Prosecutor Age: 41
Homma’s five defense counsel:
Maj. John H. Skeen, Jr. of Baltimore, MD, Chief Counsel (1915-1987)
Cpt. George William Ott, of Wilmette, IL (1904-1956)
Cpt. Frank Coder, Jr., of Somerset, PA (1910-1953)
Lt. Leonard Nataupsky, of Chelsea, MA (1920-1994)
Lt. Robert L. Peltz, of New York, NY (1918-2013)
Average Defense Counsel Age: 33
Homma’s Military War Crimes Tribunal:
Gen. Leo B. Donovan, of Selma, AL, President (1895-1950) [1]
Major General Basilio Valdes of the Philippine Army (1892-1970) [The Japanese military had beheaded Gen. Valdes’ father]
Gen. Robert Gibbons Gard Sr. (1899-1983)
Gen. Arthur Gilbert Trudeau (1902-1991) [Trudeau in his 1988 memoirs would later claim that he was the lone holdout against hanging Homma, causing him, instead, to be executed by firing squad]
Gen. Warren Henry McNaught (1894-1984)
Average Judge age: 50
The unfair experienced arrayed against Homma can be neatly summarized thusly: Chief Prosecutor Meek started his law practice in 1915. Chief Defender Skeen got his law degree in 1941 and had never practiced previously.
Later articles about the trial noted that MacArthur not only appointed the judges, the defense team, and the prosecutors, but that he also stood to receive and approve of the verdict… over a General who had defeated him in battle.
Others have pointed out what a load of b.s. this arrangement was, and frankly how unnecessary it was given the circumstances. This was a show trial with MacArthur as the director and producer.
John Toland writes about the problems in the Homma trial on page 416 of “But Not in Shame”
Skeen later bragged that, since the evidence was overwhelming, it was actually a great victory to have General Homma shot before the firing squad like a true military man and not hung like some common miscreant.
John Skeen: “You see, I actually won the case because my client who got murdered in a show trial received the type of execution he preferred.”
MacArthur declared the Homma trial the fairest one in history.
MacArthur dismissed the two dissenting Supreme Court Justices’ opinions with this bit of sophistry about justice itself:
The New York Times actually reported MacArthur’s more complete statement, which is even more insane given the fuller context. Reading the statement below makes me ashamed that I’ve ever uttered a positive sentiment about MacArthur.
PROBLEM 4: The story’s original release was clearly Military Propaganda and an “Issue Campaign” where they lied about even small items
Melvyn McCoy and Stephen Mellnik were the primary authors of “Ten Escape from Tojo” and while reading newspaper accounts closest in time to the original release, some factual problems appear right away.
Namely they materially misrepresent the nature of the American surrender at Corregidor on May 6, 1942.
Here’s what Stephen Mellnik says in the February 7th, 1944 issue of the Lincoln Journal Star:
Now, this might seem like a small detail, and I have been accused of nitpicking a few times before, but there weren’t three hours passing before the Japanese marines swarmed the navy tunnel after the American surrender.
The mentioned “Navy tunnel” is the “Malinta Tunnel” and it’s, today, a tourist destination.
Things were much different on May 6, 1942.
Toland again discusses the situation on pages 352-353 of “But Not in Shame”:
Wainwright tried to surrender only Corregidor. Homma demanded that he, as Supreme Commander, surrender all his troops. This back and forth played out, and Wainwright chose to sign his surrender at midnight between May 6-7 and delivered his surrender to the Japanese Commander.
The Japanese were in the tunnel at the time, and they were surrounding the Americans on the island. They had campfires all around the island.
Again, here is what the military authors of the story, which originally was “Ten Escape from Tojo” and ultimately becomes the Bataan “Death March” describe it in 1944 to the newspapers:
This is just flatly a lie. It’s a lie about perhaps a small detail that no one present could have misunderstood. It’s a lie about a key moment that makes the Americans look good at the expense of the truth.
General Homma would later be indicted and executed for, among other things, refusing to initially accept Gen. Wainwright’s surrender. So the details around this incident are not trivial and they would have been well documented.
You can tell that this entire project was a military project, meant to accomplish a purpose.
PROBLEM 5: The ‘Death March’ Story and War Crime Allegations Takes Heat off of FDR & MacArthur’s Other War Crimes
The atrocity propaganda takes the focus off of other inconvenient policy decisions by Washington.
Washington wanted the Philippines to collapse and be surrendered to the Japanese.
They didn’t resupply the troops because they wanted them to collapse. This command was always expendable.
Michael Norman makes the same basic argument in 2009’s “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March” on page 234:
Now, admittedly, this part is mostly my theory. That means you can scoff at it from the start, but I think it best fits the facts.
Washington/General Marshall promoted Gen. Wainwright to lead all the forces in the Philippines even though MacArthur objected and had proposed a four-quadrant leadership style. Washington put Wainwright in this position so that he could more readily collapse all U.S. forces.
Most militaries don’t fight in order to lose, so this requires some additional explanation.
The point of the second World War, for America, was to protect and preserve the Soviet Union. The Japanese stood in the way of that goal because they kept hundreds of thousands of critical Soviet troops tied up in defensive positions in the East. In order to repulse the collapsing German/Barbarossa front, the Soviets needed the Japanese to get tied up somewhere else, and they needed America in the war for its raw industrial output.
The key to this Japanese-American war was that it could not be fought to a peaceful resolution with a treaty, freeing up those troops. Winning against the Japanese also meant letting them run out of oil on their own, within 6-9 months of Pearl Harbor.
Both the Japanese and the Americans understood in December 1941 that Japan had 6 months of oil to run their sea Empire. The Japanese attack was intended to be a short one to sue for a better peace, and a better deal, than what they were being offered in October and November 1941.
Pearl Harbor was the strike that set that plan in motion, but the remaining American outposts needed to be quickly sacrificed as well: the Philippines and Wake Island, for instance. The vast distances of the Pacific are hard to appreciate.
Hawaii is 4700 miles from Japan.
The Philippines are 2000 miles from Japan.
Without oil, the Japanese Empire is stuck with coal-fired steam engines.
Wake Island had its resupply ships, Task Force 14, containing the aircraft carrier Saratoga and under the command of Rear Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher, turned around 150 miles away from landing in the middle of the battle, a decision that ultimately collapsed morale on the island.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Stark sent a message that said, in part, “Wake is now and will continue to be a liability.”
Why was it a liability? Because they knew that they could let the Japanese simply run out of oil and exhaust themselves. This whole controversy gets lightly retconned to say that command was concerned about the ships of the task force, but the message is clear: the island itself was a liability, they wanted to let it go to the Japanese.
The task force with vital resupply was held up to refuel all of its ships in its convoy 450 miles out from Wake, as the island was under siege and in battle for weeks. To put that distance in perspective, here’s a map below where Wake Island is the red dot, the gold star to the east is Hawaii.
The battle of Wake Island lasted from December 8 through December 23rd.
When Admiral Fletcher turned around his task force, a day away from resupply, having sailed there as slowly as possible, on December 22nd, it collapsed island morale and they surrendered a day later.
Bataan and Corregidor surrendered from a lack of resupply, but they were easily resupplied from sea, and the resources were ready and waiting in Australia along with their commander MacArthur.
Just like Wake Island, the men of Bataan were left to wither, starve, and die by their Commanders.
This issue of why Bataan and Corregidor weren’t timely resupplied was explored in an academic journal ‘The Northern Mariner’, on page 166 of “Attempts to Supply The Philippines by Sea: 1942” by Charles Dana Gibson and E. Kay Gibson. Please don’t overlook the fact that their basic explanation is that there isn’t one:
The decision to starve these men into surrendering no doubt put them physically and mentally in such a state so as to not survive the long march to captivity. How much death came from malnutrition and military mismanagement, and how much came from Japanese brutality? We’ll never know, but it’s doubtful the numbers are in equity.
And just to make sure my meaning is plain here, if Wake Island’s defenders were worth the command analysis of: “Wake is now and will continue to be a liability” on December 22, 1941, then how in the world is Bataan and Corregidor any less of a liability four months later in April 1942?
It’s also worth noting that in the timeline of the Manhattan Project, this is the moment when the reality of the bomb becoming a possible weapon useful for ending the war comes into sight for the few in-the-know on the project. It would be hard to justify nuking civilian cities for a hostile power, but a hostile power that commits wanton atrocities, that is barbaric and beastly, well they seem like they deserve it.
If you want to be able to justify cooking a city of old men, women, and toddlers with the heat of the sun, you’d better have a really good excuse ready. The ‘death march’ comes as an excellent excuse.
But, any astute reader might note, there were living eyewitnesses to the ‘Death March’ - surely their testimonies cement the reality and truth of what is claimed?
Well, let’s look at five of the Bataan survivor stories.
EXAMINATION OF FIVE SURVIVOR STORIES
Barney McClue - May 6, 1992, Fairfield Sun Times
There were two marches, one 65 miles long, and the other 200mi long.
No food or water on the march. Many lacked shoes. No hats or helmets, and everything was taken.
20,000 prisoners on the death march.
200/day died on the march. (1,600) 100/day died in the camp in the first six months. (18,000)
Spent time at Cabanatuan and then Bilibed Prison in Manila, then Fort Stautsinburg, then Philippine prison camps, then Japan.
Was on a POW ship when 12 of the 13 ships were sunk at Luzon.
Worked in a sugar factory in Taiwan.
Was in a POW camp in Nagoya for the atomic bombings and felt the tremors 100 miles away from both cities.
Went from 140 pounds to 80 pounds while in captivity.
Awarded the Silver Star, which he never talks about.
Analysis of Barney McClue’s story: Well, let’s start with the most inconsequential part: Nagoya is not 100 miles away from either Hiroshima (300 miles) or Nagasaki (561 miles). So there’s zero chance he felt or saw the after-effects of the atomic bombings as either a tremor or a lightshow. The tremor range of modern nuclear weapons is a few dozen miles. This is a common confabulation of Pacific veterans for some reason. His numbers about how many were on the march are off as well, he claims there was 20k when there were 75k, of which 10k were Americans. I also think the general story of being on a Japanese ‘hell ship’ in a convoy of 13 where 12 sank is also probably suspect. Generally speaking, submarines rarely took out an entire convoy like McClue describes. Rather, it’s more common that they would be lucky to sink one of the ships in a convoy. The combination of 1) a notorious ship, 2) in an unrealistic convoy, 3) where he’s on the ship that’s the sole survivor, 4) among other flashpoints in the war, is a very unlikely combo. It’s a definite trend among WW2 veterans that many claimed they were at historical moments that they likely weren’t. The temptation to steal the opprobrium and interest is perhaps too great, even for a Silver Star.
Al ‘Duke’ Fullerton - Nov. 11, 2000 - The Palm Beach Post
9,300 surrendered from Bataan, and 12,000 surrendered on Corregidor
700 died on the march, 1,461 died at the first POW camp, 3,000 at the second, 1,300 on three different hell ships.
85% of those who surrendered did not survive the war.
50 American POWs died per day at the camps, 500 Filipinos per day.
Japanese fed POW’s only a bowl of rice per day
After 6 weeks, 1,500 died in captivity
2 months at Camp O’Donnell, then Cabanatuan.
3,000 POW’s would die at Cabanatuan.
In Dec. ‘44, he was on a hell ship with 1,640 souls
Russians worked 25,000 Jap POW’s from his camp to death in Siberia
Awarded the Bronze Star, which he never talks about.
Analysis of Al ‘Duke’ Fullerton’s story: Again we have so many problems with the numbers. The official march death toll is now down to 700 by the year 2000. Fullerton’s numbers much better align with DoD’s current death estimates for the camps.
Joseph Prukop - 1983 - Publication name unknown but has since gone defunct
Hungry and dehydrated, the Japs made the POWs march in the heat of the day
He observed many brutalities, including the murder of POW’s
Liberated in August 1945 by Russian troops in Manchuria, having been stationed at the Mukden camp
Survivors were threatened by the government and instructed not to talk about their experiences.
(writing this out since the scan is hard to read)
He chooses to speak out now ‘because it needs to be said,’ he said. ‘The American people and the rest of the world need to know what happened to us.’Prukop says he has kept his silence for so long because of a document he and other American POW’s were required to sign before they could come home again.
“We had to agree not to talk about our experiences, or we faced 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine,” he said.So why is he willing to tell the story now?
“Because I’m 66 years old, and crippled up with arthritis and a bad back. Hell, if they want to do something to me now — let ‘em!” he said.
The men left there were starving and held onto hope for a resupply convoy that never came
They were loaded into a so-called “hell ship” that was harassed by American submarines. 25% died during the trip from the Philippines to Korea.
Captivity was so bad they ate things like stray dogs.
Analysis of Joseph Prukop story: A long-time friend and reader sent this one in, so I’m loathe to dissect it. Of all the stories I’ve examined so far, it feels the most ‘real’ and credible. The credibility comes from the fact he’s mainly describing what he went through, and isn’t trying to talk about facts, events, and movements he would likely not have known.
Charlie Franklin James (1921-2011): Carlsbad Current-Argus, May 10, 1998 - Obituary
Saw a friend get shot for trying to get water without permission
Was lined up before a fake firing squad and then told to march
Any men with Japanese money, insignia, or other items either had them confiscated or were murdered for the items
Was put on a ship to work in Japan after the march. His obit says that it was the ‘hell ship’ Nagato Maru.
The ships were bombed by American bombers, and many other ships in the convoy were sunk.
Felt the Hiroshima bomb but not the Nagasaki bomb.
Men gorged themselves to death on airdropped food.
Analysis of the Charlie James story:
Reports indicate the Nagato Maru made one voyage with POW’s, where they had 1,500 of them en route to Japan. So that’s possible. Many of the other details are kind of the generic Bataan-survivor story: death march, hell ships, not a lot of details. He’s 355 miles away from Nagasaki while at Oeyama, and Oeyama is 159 miles from Hiroshima. He didn’t feel the blasts, so that part is inaccurate.
Overall Analysis and Conclusions:
The Bataan story certainly has some holes. It’s probably premature to draw too many conclusions from the incongruities. The “Bataan Project” website has a lot of good resources on the topic, including rosters and photographs in case you want more.
The abandonment of Wake Island and the Bataan soldiers could be explained as simply the cold pragmatic cynical reality that Washington found itself in from December 1941 through April 1942.
The inconsistent eyewitness stories, where they synch up on big details like the march itself, the horrible camp conditions, and the so-called hell ships, and liberation from the Russians, might be 50 year retrospectives from men who were overly coached for trial purposes.
The judicial violations of due process for Gen. Homma could just be vengeance for perceived war crimes.
Requiring silence from the Bataan survivors could just be U.S. bureaucracy run amok. An interesting fact is that the Japanese allowed P.O.W.’s to write home to their families.
It’s really only when you put it all together that it starts to suggest a different narrative altogether.
Let me be crystal clear that I think the forced march happened, and people died, and it was very unpleasant. But its later use as a political weapon, as atrocity propaganda, was deliberate and ahistorical. An uncritical press repeated these stories over and over again, cementing them in the public consciousness, which had the convenient benefit of morally prepping them to drop atomic bombs.
The trial of Homma served many purposes, including silencing a foe, revenge against someone who bested MacArthur, but also in simple bloodlust. It seared the official story in blood, which has a time-tested way of ensuring that challenges to the official narrative must overcome not only the atrocity propaganda, but must now deal with the murder of a military man innocent of the substance of the charges against him.
The low-quality of the eyewitness accounts, where they all repeat the same kind of cultish highlights: a guy they saw being murdered for getting water, hell ships, feeling the heat from the atomic bombs, just shows you that the trauma of being a POW, and the unique story they all likely had, was blended together by censorship, threats, and time into being one basic stew of a story.
But we can see Washington’s duplicity in the way they acted repeatedly: provoking and lying about Pearl Harbor, abandoning and refusing relief to Wake Island’s defenders, and refusing resupply and abandoning the Philippines.
The many lies we still believe about WW2, the Pacific Theater, the Japanese, General Homma, the Death March, Wake Island, FDR, all show the power of the propaganda, the power of the original narrative, and the ongoing power of our academics to militantly preserve the official story no matter the cost.
TWO FULL-LENGTH ARTICLES FOLLOW BELOW
HERE’S THE FULL JOSEPH PRUKOP STORY:
HERE’S THE FULL FEB. 7, 1944 STORY IN LIFE MAGAZINE:
General Homma received "Victor's Justice." In his trial as it was done at Nuremberg, confession and admission of guilt by torture was standard fare. These and other stories that have been unearthed gives question to almost all the narratives of historical events that shaped the 20th century and the present.
Another comment given to me verbally by a reader: "I don't understand what the hell the Malinta Tunnel has to do with this piece."
Answer: This is a fair criticism. I don't think I made the point very plainly. The point I was trying to make was that they were lying even about the basic details. They were lying about prominent minor details, things that no one would have remembered wrong. So many little facts are frankly immaterial in hindsight. But the question of whether or not the Japs were ***three hours away*** at the time of surrender, or whether they were ***in the actual tunnel with you***, is quite another. So that was my point.