Re: Bataan Remembered

Date: May 29, 2004

"Death march survivor recalls 3-year ordeal
T-burg resident spent most of war emaciated, laboring for Japanese army

By DIANA LaMATTINA Journal Staff

In the comfort of his Trumansburg home, Bill Alford flipped through the July 1942 edition of LIFE magazine until he came to a black-and-white picture of himself as a teenager, dressed in uniform in 1939 aboard a train.

"I would never take a million dollars to give up the experience and would never take a dime for another one like it," Alford said, as he pointed toward the caption identifying him as one of the soldiers missing in action after a battle in the Philippines.

The United States controlled the Philippines before World War II. Hours after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began their assault on U.S. troops at the Pacific nation. By Feb. 22, 1942, Gen. Douglas MacArthur withdrew his main army, leaving U.S. and Filipino forces to defend the island chain and slow the Japanese advance.

As a survivor of the Bataan Death March, Alford was one of 70,000 U.S. and Filipino soldiers who surrendered on April 9, 1942, and were then forced by the Japanese army to march about 90 miles without food or water. Alford and the other 54,000 soldiers who reached camp alive then worked as slave laborers for the Japanese until being liberated by the Allies in 1945.

Seventeen-year-old Alford joined the Kentucky National Guard in 1939, after convincing his mother to sign a certificate stating he was 18 years old. About a year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared all National Guard units federal troops. Alford, who was in his senior year of high school, found himself preparing to be shipped overseas as part of a provisional tank group.

"It didn't change any plans because I didn't have any plans for the future at that time," he said.

Bearing a tattoo with his and his high school sweetheart's name on his right arm, Alford left with 65 men from his small hometown to begin his military service.

Over the next year, he served at a few stateside bases before traveling to Guam, a tiny island at the southern end of a long chain leading to Japan, as the platoon sergeant of a battalion. In November 1941, at the orders of Gen. George Patton, Alford was sent with a provisional tank group and the 192nd Tank Battalion to the Philippines.

"We sailed in blackout -- no lights anywhere, because subs could pick up lights miles away," he said.

When they arrived in late November at Fort Stotsenberg in Manila, they were instructed that their job was to enforce black out rules and to set a perimeter around the field so soldiers on parachutes could drop in safely, Alford said.

"Eighteen days after we got there they dumped on us and all hell broke loose."

Sitting in his home last week, holding a palm-sized notebook with a visibly-aged green cover, he skimmed through his own handwriting on the yellowed pages looking for a specific entry. He had written down dates and memories in the tiny book while in Japan and the Philippines, after the Japanese had surrendered in 1945.

"They bombed us at Clark Field at 12:29 p.m. Dec. 8 -- four hours after Pearl Harbor," Alford said finding the entry, and noting that there was a time discrepancy because of time zones and the International Date Line. "They destroyed 89 airplanes and 236 were killed."

After the initial attack, Alford, along with other American and Filipino troops, suffered from hunger as they fought off continual attacks from the Japanese. On Christmas Day 1941, he noted in his book that there were "plenty of bullets, no chow."

"The hard part was that most everything built here (in the U.S.) was going to Europe -- it left us hanging."

'Starved out, beaten down'

During the 122 days of holding off the Japanese advance, the troops became "starved out and beaten down," Alford said. On April 9, 1942, in hopes of preventing more loss of life, Major Gen. Edward P. King ordered the surrender of all troops.

The troops received word of the impending surrender at 1 a.m., Alford recalled and confirmed by looking through his book. King's orders demanded that all combat equipment, except wheeled vehicles, were to be destroyed by dawn.

"All dreams of help had faded. We knew we were waiting for ships that never would come in. We had held the (Japanese advance) for more than four months -- it's more than the mission called for," 82-year-old Alford read from that date's entry in the book. "After three months of hell, we felt a great relief. We didn't know what would happen next ... if we only knew."

After the sun rose, the Japanese army came in and took control of the surrendered troops.

The Japanese marched the captured soldiers to nearby Mariveles, about 12 miles, before strip searching them and taking everything they had, Alford recalled. From there, U.S. and Filipino soldiers were force marched more than 90 miles, north along Manila Bay and the Bataan peninsula.

The trip took the soldiers nine days, all without food. After a short train trip, they were made to walk an additional day, ending their trek at Camp O'Donnell.

"Those strong enough made it and those who weren't didn't. We lost thousands of men," Alford recalled. "I never once gave up hope. I got discouraged. But I had made up my mind that if anyone was going to make it, I would."

The soldiers, many of whom were starving and sick before the Bataan Death March began, were tortured. Any man who fell behind, collapsed or complained was killed as his comrades were forced to watch, Alford said. At times, the intensely dehydrated troops were told by the Japanese to stand at attention for hours under the hot sun next to a small stream.

"We drank from every mudhole I could find -- thanks to saving some chlorine powder," Alford said. "I managed to keep from getting sick."

Upon arriving at Camp O'Donnell, the torture, disease and death continued. Alford said he remembered carrying out 40 or 50 bodies every morning during burial detail.

"Morale was pretty low most of the time. Once in a while someone broke a smile," Alford said. "I never thought about it being low morale. Every now and again a guy just gave up -- but not very often."

On May 2, 1942, he was transferred to work as a truck driver, before working a year cutting scrap iron for the Japanese. Weighing only 115 pounds, Alford stayed on this detail until July 26, 1943 when he was chosen as one of 50 men to go to Manila and work as a mechanic. Upon arriving there, he saw 22 tanks painted in Japanese green with a red dot on top.

"Six months after we got there, only two were running," Alford said with a chuckle. "We sabotaged every one of them."

During this time, Alford temporarily became almost blind as a result of malnutrition. He recalls not being able to open his eyes in the daylight. He spent six weeks in a hospital -- which he describes as a prison camp, before being transferred to a prison in Manila. He worked there until he was selected as part of 1,000 men to be taken to Japan in July 1944.

The men were loaded into a storage area in the bottom of the ship which sat at Manila Bay for 16 days -- "the 16 most miserable days of my life," Alford read evenly from his notes.

When the ship took to the sea, it faced the additional danger of being sunk by U.S. subs, as other ships with similar purposes had, since they were not marked as carrying prisoners. About 50 days later, the men were still at sea.

"The only way we could tell we were moving is through the cracks in the boards overhead," Alford said.

Their space was limited after a load of salt was added to their "living area" and days of heavy storms rocked the ship.

"I've never been so hungry in my life," Alford wrote later. "The treatment is getting worse ... morale is at its lowest."

When the ship finally landed at a Japanese port in September 1944, the prisoners were taken by ferry and then by train to a mine camp about 20 miles south of Tokyo. At that specific coal mine, 250 prisoners of war worked 12- and 15-hour-days with Dutch soldiers captured when Singapore fell, and Korean families who had been made prisoners, Alford said.

Germany falls

While they worked at the mines, rumors spread rampantly and were later confirmed that Germany had fallen on May 9, 1945. Later, other rumors of "a large bomb with a gigantic parachute" being dropped in Hiroshima, about 60 miles away, also crept up frequently, Alford said. Hope of Allied forces claiming victory in the Pacific began to rise.

"We knew for several weeks that the allied troops were in the area," Alford said. "We could hear shelling in the distance -- it was almost a constant roar."

On Aug. 15, the Japanese came into the camp and woke the men up in the middle of the night to say there was no work the next day. When the men woke in the morning, they found that the guards had disappeared and civilians had taken on guard duty, Alford said. The men were able to raid the Japanese warehouse and locate rice and supplies to make the first decent meal they had in a long time. Alford recalled weighing only 95 pounds at that time.

After the Japanese soldiers had been gone a few days, the prisoners noticed that Americans were flying over the camps. By invading the Japanese guard house, the prisoners found dozens of rice mats, which they used to form a large "PW" on the ground outside the camp in the valley, Alford said.

"Three B-29's flew over our camp. And if you ever had the hair on your back stand up, that was it," Alford recalled.

The planes, which had flown over at a height of 500 feet, passed the camp and then circled around to unload 55 gallon drums packed with clothes and food, Alford said. Days later, when the planes came back a second time, the prisoners were able to use a lamp to flash Morse code as a way of communicating with the troops. They were told that the war was over, but to stay in the camp until the troops could evacuate them, Alford said.

After three weeks of continuing to receive more food drops, but no doctors or signs of rescue, the men decided to leave. Before heading out, Alford grabbed a picture connected to wooden tag with his name written in Japanese off of a board in the Japanese guard house.

Knowing where the coal ships loaded, the men took over a train and rode it for a day-and-a-half until they arrived just south of Tokyo Port, Alford said. There they were greeted by Allied Forces, given fresh T-shirts and dungarees, and put through decontamination radiation. Four or five weeks later, Alford and the others were placed on a hospital ship for transport home, he said. Once stateside, Alford made his way to Kentucky, before traveling to Indiana to be processed for discharge.

"All the time, I just kept thinking of home -- and how big the steak was going to be when I got there," Alford said with a huge smile.

After the war, Alford married his high school sweetheart, Mary, and began working as an apprentice at automobile dealerships under the G.I. Bill. With his wife, Alford moved to Trumansburg to become the parts manager at a dealership owned by her brother in the 1950s. Since retiring in the 1970s, Alford said he and his wife stay in the area to be closer to their family.

Although Alford admits that talking about his experiences in combat and the long ordeal as a prisoner of war sometimes causes "certain things to come back," he said he speaks of it in hopes others learning the facts about history.
"I've always been able to talk about it, but most people never understood about these things," Alford said. "I'd like for people to know what went on and not to forget about it, so we're able to learn from our mistakes."

Contact: dlamattina@ithaca.gannett.com
©2004 The Ithaca Journal"