<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Let's go back, so after the surrender, and so the artillery unit comes and takes, and the officers speak English, how were you treated? I mean, what happened next?

BB: He told us to stay there, and somebody would... I don't remember what he said, but he told our commander to go to the, to the road, and we had a main, one solitary road going down, up and down Bataan. It was the only paved truck road there was, and so we were to gather there. We had, we were about quarter of a mile or at least that far from this road, where we went off the road into Cabcaben, and we were supposed to go to Mariveles, which is, oh, about five or six miles away. So when we were walking -- this is the group that was in this Cabcaben, we're about, oh, I guess there was about thirty or so -- and we walked past another infantry outfit, and they had horses with miniature artillery. They used to have these small artillery pieces, .20 mm.

TI: These are Japanese?

BB: Japanese. And they were infantry, but, and they had a few horses, and one of these Japanese was hanging onto a horse's tail, he was exhausted. In fact, they were all pretty well worn and weary. And he was barely able to walk, hanging onto this horse tail. He finally fell on the road, right, right, here we were right alongside, about from here to the road over there. And he's on a different level, we're down here in sort of a little gully, and he's up there on the hill about twenty feet or so higher from us. And that's the path they were on, we're not on the path. And what we later learned was an officer, probably a second lieutenant or something, came over and shouted to this fellow, kicked him and whatnot. He finally ordered him to get up and he wouldn't get up. He poked him with his -- they all wore sabers, and he poked him with a scabbard, nothing happened, he pulled out a pistol and shot him, right in front of us.

TI: So he shot his own soldier?

BB: Shot his own soldier. That was not uncommon. In the Japanese army, it was not uncommon at all.

TI: And when you saw that, what were you thinking when you saw that?

BB: We didn't know what to expect. We thought, "Oh boy, look what's going to happen to us. We're all going to be killed as soon as we get out here." We thought we were going to be killed. So anyhow, I ended up on the march. There were four of us that were friends, we went to school together. A fellow by the name of Lang, Sid Lang, who was tech sergeant, and a fellow by the name of Cunningham, Russ Cunningham, and then Bernard, Manny Bernard. We were the four leading sergeants in this group headquarters company, and we decided that we should, if we were gonna survive, each one of us had to do a task, so we drew straws as to what everybody would do. One guy would get water, that ended up me, one guy would scrounge food, one guy would be a lookout, and the other guy would be a lookout to the rear in order to keep track of the guards. We had that much forethought, I don't know whether it was because of our training or whatnot. Anyhow, why, as we went along, why, as the march began, this is in the middle of the hottest year in the Philippines. We're in the dry season, temperatures were 95 to 110 or so. So the first thing you discarded was anything that wasn't useful; blankets, extra uniforms, anything. So the roadside was just littered, all the way. Blankets, jackets, helmets, anything. Well, I had, when we passed through a constabulary depot, supply depot, I had grabbed a towel, a constabulary towel and wrapped it around my head as a turban, threw the helmet away. That's the way I walked in the march, with this towel around my head. And I grabbed water anytime I could. So what I would do, different than most guys, I would get three canteen (cups). You could hold canteens in your hand, they had canteen cups. Four would be a, be a no-no, but three or two, and I would run to anyplace I saw water and scoop it. They had all these cisterns along the road; scoop water and then go back into line, so I was never bothered by any of the guards. Anybody else that they caught there, they'd stab 'em, beat 'em, or kill 'em.

TI: And you weren't, you weren't hurt by the guards because you did it so quickly? You would just do it and then leave...

BB: We managed to get to the front line always, in these groups of a hundred. We managed to come, the four of us decided the only way we were gonna survive this thing is to be in the head column, head of the column. So we would eventually walk faster and get to the head of each column, we could see what was happening from the column ahead of us. And so we knew what to expect most of the time.

TI: And the others were kind of watching out for you as you, as you did it, also?

BB: Well, we watched the guards, where they were, and they weren't, each group of a hundred had, probably had two or three guards at most, one on each side of us, and then maybe an extra at the tail end or so.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.