Soldiers still march, remember deaths

It was April 1943, and Jesse Knowles was hunched over, writing the story of the “Death March”… It was April 1943, and Jesse Knowles was hunched over, writing the story of the “Death March” in poetic verse. He sat in a sea of hundreds of dirty, bloodied and hungry American soldiers waiting out World War II as prisoners of war being held by the Japanese in Mukden, Manchuria.

But he wrote about the forced trek through the Philippine jungle of the Bataan Peninsula like he was still marching, praying he wouldn’t pass out and fall down.

It had been a year since he and roughly 76,000 other American and Filipino soldiers, after holding out for months against an overwhelming Japanese force invading the Philippine Islands, had been ordered to lay down their weapons on April 9, 1942 by Major General Edward P. King, commanding officer of the forces on Bataan. Looking back at the brutal weeks that followed, Knowles expressed through poetry, in what would become his story “They,” what he saw play out by the side of the road north into imprisonment.

“We marched along in columns of four

Living and seeing the horrors of war

And when a man fell along the way

A cold bayonet would make him pay

For those four months he fought on Bataan

Then they’d kill him ’cause he couldn’t stand.”

For days, without food or water, they were force-marched from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula on the island of Luzon, 55 miles north to the town of San Fernando. There, the soldiers were stuffed by the hundreds into boxcars for the sweltering four-hour train ride to imprisonment at a place known as Camp O’Donnell. In the wake, the beaten and looted bodies of about 650 Americans and thousands of Filipinos littered the route. At the end of their trek, survivors saw thousands more of their comrades killed in short order by brutal camp conditions.

Sixty-two years later, on March 21, 2004, Pitt student Wes Harris found himself on the White Sands Missile Range in the high desert of New Mexico to commemorate what has become known as “The Bataan Death March” by, of all things, marching.

Since 1989, the Army ROTC at New Mexico State University has sponsored “The Bataan Memorial Death March,” in which participants marched a full marathon distance of 26.2 miles. In 1992, the New Mexico National Guard, the 200th Coast Artillery of which was among those marching through the jungles of Bataan, joined in sponsorship, and the event was moved to White Sands.

Harris, a former national guardsman in his thirties, was one of a handful of Pennsylvanians who joined hundreds of others — including military, ROTC and civilian teams from around the country — in running through sandy desert trails in the shadow of mountains about a mile above sea level, in order to physically honor the torturous price paid by those in the Philippine jungles.

This time, there were medics and water points stationed all along the course, but according to Harris, who finished in 8 hours, 16 minutes, the assistance didn’t make it much easier for him.

“I thought back to my Basic Training days,” he said. “I said to myself, ’26 miles? No problem! My last road march in Basic was 36 miles, and I had at least a 50-pound rucksack, plus an M16!’ I neglected to consider the small but highly significant fact [that] I was 17 at the time and had been on an intense training schedule for the previous three months.”

Still, Harris said he felt invigorated, surrounded by so many people, both military and civilian, coming together to keep alive the memory of the declining numbers of men who wore the patches reading “The Battling Bastards Of The Bataan, No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam.”

“Fortunately, in the military, historical events like that are really emphasized, so a lot of these kids who are in the military who participated, they knew a lot about it,” Harris said. “They knew the depth to which these guys suffered.”

He added that the harsh physical lessons learned by those in Bataan were invaluable to the evolution of training techniques for American soldiers, like those who invaded the sandy landscapes of Iraq last year. Last year also marked the first time the memorial march was canceled, due to heavy military deployment to the Persian Gulf.

“In the pre-war Army, they didn’t emphasize forced marches and physical training like they do now, so it’s just a testament to how far you can push the human body,” he said.

“At least in the Army, now, you have, even in rudimentary combat training, ‘never surrender when you still have the means to resist.’ These guys were surrendered by the commanding general. They were out of food, and almost out of ammo, but they were still in there for the fight. It’s really miraculous that so many of them made it.”