Posted on 04/09/2009 8:06:15 AM PDT by VR-21
On 9 April 1942 American and Filipino forces capitulated on the Bataan penninsula. It was the largest capitulation of forces in our country's history. Sick and starved after a little over four months fighting the Japanese army, the men of Bataan endured an atrocity that became known as the Bataan Death March. They then endured a terrible captivity for the remainder of the war. During the months of fighting, the men of Bataan believed that help was on the way, but they eventually realized that there was none. The following song came about then, which expressed their bitter dissapointment;
We're the Battling Bastards of Bataan.
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces
And nobody gives a damn.
The men of Bataan paid a terrible price, and today I wish for them to be remembered.
amen
I get a lump in my throat every time I read these:
Thank you so much! I never heard anything about the March either. Neither of my grandparents talked about losing their sons. My dad's mom had pictures of their son's caskets with the American Flag draping across them. By the time I started going to visit with them during the summer, it had been many years since they were killed, so they didn't talk about it. One time I asked my grandma who was in those caskets and she said "those are my sons who were killed in the war." That was it. She never said another word about it.
I heard more about it from my mother's side of the family because their son/brother was still buried in the Phillipines. Mom told me that my grandparents were poor during the war and didn't have the money to bring him back to the states so they buried him there. She always hoped that some day he would walk through that door since she never saw him in the casket, she held out hope that it might have been a mistake, and wasn't him. She grieved a lot over him. I can only imagine how difficult it was never really knowing for sure if that was him.
I think the government should have brought all of those men home. They abandoned them in the Death March and they abandoned them in the cemetery!
Thank you for sharing that. I’ve never seen one of those before, and it certainly does capture the anguish of those last days and moments on “The Rock.” All the more so, because we know what lies ahead for Irving Strober. Thank you again, that was quite moving.
That must have been a great experience to get to meet Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos. The troops were probably thrilled to get to make such an exciting trip. The planes woke you guys up, did they? LOL That would have caused a weak knee or two. :o)
Accept my gratitude and respect also.
I think that too many young people don’t know their history of World War II. I guess they don’t teach it in school much anymore.
Whenever I have talked to young people nowadays about history, they don’t seem to know a lot. They don’t know about the Bataan Death March. They don’t know how Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo rallied the nation. They don’t know what happened at the Battle of Midway. They don’t know what happened at Dunkirk. They don’t know about Guadalcanal. They don’t know the significance of D-Day and the Normandy invasion.
They do know, however, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how some people view these bombings as war crimes. They do know about the internment of Japanese-Americans, and how some people view that as a war crime. They do know about Pearl Harbor, but think that we somehow invited the attack.
I think they are being taught politically correct history in the schools. Sometimes I wish I was a teacher and could teach the kids real history.
VR-21,
This is an appropriate first post for me! My forum name, 41st Infantry Division is in honor of my father. He, being part of the 41st, spent his service time in the Pacific.
On occasion he would speak of experiences he had in WWII. In many of these cases he would start off with the fact that they were there to pay back the enemy for the mistreatment of our guys in the Bataan Death March.
This slice of his life was intense - through all the fear and aspects of battle fatigue (similar to “With The Old Breed”), they kept going because of the conduct of the Japanese on Bataan. In his own words, “there was a reason to be there,” and this kept the 41st moving forward.
Later in life he had a few friends at Boeing that either survived, or knew someone that survived Bataan.
My memories are of the camaraderie between those men. As they talked they were 20 years old again, and I was fortunate enough to be part of the conversation all those years later.
I don’t mean to ramble on my first post, so I’ll sign off and salute VR-21’s father and those souls who struggled through the Bataan experience.
Don’t blame you. One of my uncles [My Mom’s only brother to survive to adulthood] was killed by the Japanese on Guam. He had already been on Guadalcanal, and I believe, either Tarawa or Saipan. A lot of the Pacific War gets ignored.
So does a lot of North Africa [except, maybe, Kasserine], Sicily, and the bulk of the Italian campaign. In the post D-Day campaign, you don’t here a lot about the Bocage, the Huertgen Forest and the campaign in southern France. It should ALL be remembered
Uh-RAH!
MacArthur’s slip into Bataan and Corregidor was one of the most brilliant military moves in history.
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