<Begin Segment 10>

TI: And so they, the main army comes, and then --

BB: The main army came.

TI: -- and then what, what happened then?

BB: Well, see, we lost our air force, we didn't have any airplanes, and so the Japanese air force bombed us every single day. And we always had a recon plane up there, we used to call him Photo Joe, he was always flying around looking things over. So they knew exactly where everything was, except that Bataan is a, at the time was a jungle. There weren't very many farms or anything there, it was all forest and bamboos and whatnot, a real heavy jungle. So we were parked under bamboos most of the time, or mango trees.

TI: And then what happened? So the Japanese had superior air force, they bombed, they had the army...

BB: Well, most of the Americans, I guess, and the Filipinos were... they just all of a sudden fell, they were all, mass killing and whatnot, because they were the forward lines. And the survivors retreated, and we ended up in Cabcaben with the headquarters tanks. I ended up there accidentally with my two trucks. [Laughs] I finally lost one truck, he came, he went ahead of me and got there first, and I went there the next day.

TI: So you're retreating and you're regrouping at this camp.

BB: We're regrouping at Cabcaben, which was right next to Mariveles, which is the tip of Bataan.

TI: And you still have a couple tanks there?

BB: Had about, oh, had the headquarters group of tanks, probably about half-a-dozen tanks, and two or three half-tracks and a lot of trucks, jeeps and whatnot, motorcycles. We ended up setting everything on fire.

TI: Because you knew that you were going to be overrun and you wanted to destroy the...

BB: We were told to destroy 'em. And about that time was, the surrender happened that very same day.

TI: So at that point, the high command had decided you were going to surrender, they didn't want the Japanese to get the equipment, so you destroyed the equipment.

BB: Destroyed everything, yeah.

TI: What was the, the mood of the group? I mean, this was, as this was going on?

BB: Well, you realize we'd never been in combat before until the war started, so we didn't have any experience. We didn't know what to expect. Now, we were captured by artillery unit, and then the, most of the Japanese officers spoke good English.

TI: Interesting. Why... I would not have expected that.

BB: I was in a prison camp, Captain Saito was the commander, he was educated, guess where? A graduate of Yale University. Spoke better English than the Englishmen, fluent English. Didn't speak one word of English 'til after the war. When Japan surrendered, next day he spoke actually, fluent English to everybody.

TI: So I, so he was the commander of this prisoner of war camp --

BB: The prison camp.

TI: -- he never spoke English?

BB: Never spoke English.

TI: Until after the war. Why was that? I don't understand.

BB: I don't know, but a lot of our guards had learned English. We had one we called the Old Sailor who was pretty nice. He was the only one that was really decent to us. He had been around the world, and of course, he was a, had been on merchant ships all his life, spoke fluent English, fluent French, fluent German.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.