After 65 years, news service adjusts Bataan photo caption to match veteran’s memory

Stars and Stripes ^ | March 22, 2010 | Adam Geller

[Jet Jaguar]

For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by the memory of carrying fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.

After six months of research, The Associated Press is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

Over the years, the photo has become perhaps the most widely published image of what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.

But for many of those years, Love, a native of Albuquerque, N.M., who fought to defend Bataan as a 19-year-old Army corporal, saw captions paired with the photo that he believed did a disservice to the truth.

Last August, Love picked up the Albuquerque Journal and saw the photo again, together with a front-page story about Bataan survivors. He called the newspaper and told an editor the caption was wrong.

“That picture is not of the Death March,” says Love, now 87. “The Japanese would not have tolerated a bunch of slow marching guys carrying their own dead. They wouldn’t have tolerated it just one New York minute.”

A Journal reporter, Charles D. Brunt, found other local Bataan survivors who agreed, wrote a story about the conflicting information and contacted AP, the source of both the photo and the caption. That launched the cooperative’s own investigation of the photo, originally supplied to news services by the U.S. military after it was confiscated from defeated Japanese forces.

AP archivists contacted the Pentagon. Eventually, that led to the original photograph, on file in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The catalog recorded it as a photo of U.S. prisoners using improvised litters to carry comrades. But a note filed along with the image, date unknown, said that, according to a retired U.S. Army colonel, the photo was not of the death march, but of the burial detail in the weeks that followed.

That’s exactly the way Love had long recalled it.

“We rounded up bamboo poles ... and we confiscated what blankets we could from the incoming prisoners. We told them we had to have them. The guys were dying faster than we could dig graves or carry them,” Love said. “We carried them 1,000 yards and we would just unload the blankets there and the guys would fall out into the graves. I did that every day until the late hours of the evening for six weeks.”

After discussing the evidence, AP decided to correct the caption. It now reads, in part, “At the time of its release, this photo was identified as dead and wounded being carried by fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942 ... Subsequent information from military archivists, the National Archives and Records Administration, and surviving prisoners, strongly suggests that this photo may actually depict a burial detail at Camp O’Donnell.”

[Jet Jaguar]

For 68 years, John Love, 87, a Bataan Death March survivor, has been haunted by the memory of carrying fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.

After six months of research, The Associated Press last week corrected the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

[TigerBait]

Is this that war that Tom Hanks was fought because the U.S. was racist?

[al baby]

My Dad said the Japs asked us to dance so dance we did

[ExTexasRedhead]

These American patriots gave so much for the sake of our freedom including my beloved father, David. Today we saw traitors give that away. God help us.

[MikefromOhio]

err wha???

[VR-21]

[SoCalPol]

I had a relative in the Batan Death March.
He came home in a box.

[Jet Jaguar]

Many from New Mexico fought bravely and had no choice but to surrender.

Many died.

[SouthTexas]

May those that gave their all rest in peace, they won their war. It is up to us now to maintain it.

[SoCalPol]

My relative was from Ohio.

FDR was sending supplies to Uncle Joe in Russia
that would have helped in the Pacific

[Candor7]

Eff these traitors. We will sluice out a lot of them in November.

[manic4organic]

Bing it. It happened.

[chichipow]

You must not have heard dumazz Hanks talking about WWII and how it was a racist war.

Well he did. He’s just as big a libtard as most of the rest of Hollyweird.

[VeniVidiVici]

After six months of research, The Associated Press is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their surrender to Japanese forces on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula in April 1942.

The AP has a long history of "miscaptioning" photos.

[calex59]

Yeah, but according to Tom “commie” Hanks, we only fought them because we hated their skin color.

[calex59]

Yep, FDR almost cost us the war in the Pacific because of his BS about the war in Europe. Guadalcanal almost fell back to the Japanese because of his crap. If it wasn’t for captured food and supplies the Marines would have all starved to death simply because the navy refused to stay there and unload and FDR didn’t do anything about it and wouldn’t send planes or other needed equipment to the Marines. We were on the Canal months longer than we had to be because of his blind spot about the war in Europe VS the war in the Pacific.

[SoCalPol]

My friend Will who fought at Guadalcanal does not see
it as a one or the other war. He always speaks of the necessity of both theaters.

[calex59]

That’s a fact, however, our main interest lay in the Pacific and the supplies that were needed should have been sent. We were fighting there before we started fighting in Europe but FDR sent 80% to Europe and 20% to the Pacific. As I said, we were lucky to win that war at all. If we had been thrown off the Canal we would have had to take another year, or more, to beat the Japanese.

[SoCalPol]

We just did not need to supply Stalin.
We had to fight in both theaters.
I say that having not only one relative killed at Bataaan
but another relative was a B-17 pilot in Europe who
was killed.

[sheik yerbouty]

Tom Hanks, of course will rewrite the whole Pacific Theater. He and the other obamanites want to rewriote history..