Bataan

The anniversary is this week and In From The Cold has a post.

The book "Ghost Soldiers" was excellent on the matter, what those men went through defies my imagination. God Bless Them...

We're the battling bastards of Bataan,
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
…and nobody gives a damn.

They were a group of uncommonly tested men, hobbled by malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, all manner of parasites, beriberi, and the desolation that comes with imprisonment and isolation. They were the men of Bataan, the U.S. Army forces sent to wrest the Japanese from the Philippines during World War II, forced to surrender in 1942, and marched 75 miles, starving and sickly, to a Japanese death camp by the name of "Cabanatuan."

'Even in months of relative plenty they were food-obsessed. They never tired of the subject. Next to food, women didn't stand a chance. Sex was a distant memory, a vaguely amusing problem not germane to the subject. The subject was ice cream. Georgia peaches. Strawberry rhubarb pie. Asparagus with hollandaise. ...Some people fixated on exceedingly narrow bands in the culinary spectrum, and their cravings drove them nearly insane. "When I was in there all those years, mostly what I thought about was cheese," said Robert Body, a private from Detroit who had been a 31st Infantry machine gunner on Bataan. "I never ate cheese in my goddamn life, but when I got there, that's all I could think about."'

-From Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

NPR has audio with the author at that link


Route of the death march.

Prisoners on burial detail at Camp O'Donnell.