How Marine POWs Hung Tough
By Gregory J. W. Urwin

World War II  | 3 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Live-fire training, Quantico, Virginia

How Marine POWs Hung Tough

The American and Filipino forces that defended the Bataan Peninsula from January to April 1942 fought on desperately short rations. Within two months, Americans who had weighed 175 to 200 pounds had been reduced to walking skeletons of 135 to 145 pounds. Thousands contracted malaria and dysentery. Surrender on April 9, 1942, brought the exhausted American and Filipino troops no relief. Instead, the Japanese subjected their prisoners to the infamous Bataan Death March, forcing them to walk up to 140 miles without adequate food or water to a railroad station just off the peninsula. An estimated 10,650 POWs died on this hellish trek, many of them murdered when they could no longer stay on their feet or keep up with the others. Of the Death March victims, 650 were American.

On their arrival at Camp O’Donnell, most of the survivors plunged into despair. Reflecting on the horrors he witnessed at the POW enclosures in the Philippines, 1st Lt. Jack Hawkins of the 4th Marines wrote in his 1961 memoir Never Say Die, “There were many indeed who became so demoralized that they abandoned every tenet of personal integrity, honor, loyalty, and the accepted standards of human behavior. These sank to the level of animals or worse. There was a selfish, dog-eat-dog, every man for himself attitude among the prisoners and little group spirit. Discipline generally collapsed at the time of surrender. Many of the men would no longer obey the orders of their officers. Many of the officers, on the other hand, abandoned all responsibility to take care of the men. Military organizations fell apart, and were further broken up by the Japanese in a well-calculated effort to destroy group cohesion and convert the prisoners into an easily dominated, amorphous mass.”

Maj. Alva R. Fitch, an army artilleryman, described the dismal atmosphere that prevailed at Camp O’Donnell: “I have seen men try to go from barracks to the latrine who were too weak to walk and would fall down in the mud and rain, unable to rise—their friends, officers, or enlisted men, would sit in the barracks sheltered from the rain and look at them without moving to help them. I have seen men, not one but fifty or more at a time, lying in their own feces too weak to move and no one to move them.”

Col. J. V. Collier, a senior army staff officer at O’Donnell, also portrayed the camp as a place devoid of discipline and decency: “Food and water details were not supervised. Thirst crazed men were drinking the stream water. Food was not equally distributed to messes and it looked as tho the main officer’s mess was never the loser. Care of the sick was haphazard if at all. Men were found dead who had apparently died alone and unnoticed until the odor called attention to the decaying body.”

Some 17,600 Bataan survivors—1,600 of them American—perished at O’Donnell in the first seven weeks of captivity. But one group stood out through all of these hellish ordeals. Not one of the 650 Americans who died on the Death March was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. Of the American POWs on the Philippines, U.S. Army POWs experienced a death rate of 42.6 percent for the entire war, while the marines had a death rate of 31.8 percent. For the Pacific theater as a whole, the marine POW death rate was half that of the army’s: 22.8 percent vs. 40.4 percent.

Some of these differences, to be sure, reflected lucky breaks. Marines taken prisoner in North China and Wake Island were mostly held in Shanghai, which had a healthy climate compared to the disease-ridden tropics.

Cosmopolitan Shanghai also had a large international settlement housing thousands of affluent Westerners who were willing to send the POWs cash, extra food, clothing, sports equipment, and a 3,000-volume library. Neutral Switzerland maintained a consulate general in the city, and its staff exerted tactful pressure on the Japanese to improve camp conditions. Shanghai was also one of only three urban centers behind Japanese lines where the International Committee of the Red Cross received permission to operate. Shanghai’s ICRC delegate, a Swiss national named Edouard Egle, sent the POWs extra food, clothing, and recreational gear. “If it had not been for the International Red Cross,” acknowledged Pfc. Floyd H. Comfort of the Wake Island marine garrison, “I guess we all would have starved to death.”

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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