Inferno - Max Hastings [150]
Thirty-year-old Texan nurse Lt. Bertha Dworsky found that one of the worst aspects of her work was personal acquaintance with many of the terribly wounded men brought in: “They were usually people that we’d been with at the Officers’ Club, or they were our friends. It was a tremendously emotional experience. We just never knew who they were going to bring in next.” The wounded often asked if they were going to survive, and doctors disputed whether it was best to tell them the truth. Dr. Alfred Weinstein wrote: “The argument raged back and forth with nobody knowing the correct answer. Most of us followed a middle course, ducking the question … If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him last rites, collect personal mementoes and write last messages … More often than not they didn’t have to be told.”
The condition of the besiegers was little better than that of the besieged: the Japanese, too, suffered heavy losses to malaria, beriberi and dysentery—more than 10,000 sick by February. Tokyo was increasingly exasperated by American defiance, and by the triumphalist propaganda which the saga of Bataan promoted in the United States. On 3 April, Homma’s reinforced army launched a major offensive preceded by a massive bombardment. Filipino units broke in panic before Japanese tanks; every movement by the defenders provoked strafing from the air; many men were so weakened by hunger that they could scarcely move from their foxholes. The Japanese pushed steadily forward, breaching successive American lines. On the evening of 8 April, Maj. Gen. Edward King on his own initiative decided he must surrender the peninsula, and sent forward an officer bearing a white flag to the Japanese lines. From jungle refuges all over Bataan, groups of defenders emerged, seeking paths towards Corregidor Island, where Wainwright still held out.
On the morning of April 9, King met Col. Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s operations officer, to sign a surrender. “Will our troops be well treated?” King asked. The Japanese answered blandly, “We are not barbarians.” Some 11,500 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fell into enemy hands. The transfer of these debilitated men to cages became known to history as the Bataan Death March. Scores of Filipinos were casually killed, some used for bayonet practice. An American private soldier saw a weakened compatriot pushed under an advancing tank. Blair Robinett said: “Now we knew, if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.” Sgt. Charles Cook described seeing captives bayoneted if they tried to get water. Staff Sgt. Harold Feiner said: “If you fell, bingo, you were dead.” More than 300 Filipino prisoners were butchered in a ravine near the Pantingan River. Their killers explained that if the garrison had surrendered sooner they might have been treated mercifully, but as it was, “we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us.” An estimated 1,100 Americans and more than 5,000 Filipinos perished on the Death March.
The Japanese now concentrated artillery fire on Corregidor, little larger than New York’s Central Park; on 3 May Wainwright reported to MacArthur in Australia that every structure above ground had been levelled, the island denuded of vegetation. Conditions became unspeakable in the hot, stinking Malinta Tunnel, packed with fearful humanity. That night the submarine Spearfish evacuated the last party to escape safely to Australia,