The Battling Bastards of Bataan

Photo from here. This is the Camp O’Donnell Memorial Monument. The memorial was built by the organization known as “The Battling Bastards of Bataan” to honor those American men who died at Camp O’Donnell, while prisoners of the Japanese. The Cement Cross is a replica of the original cement cross built by the POWs. The monument is located in the Capas National Shrine, in Capas, Tarlac, Philippines, adjacent to the memorial for the Philippine Army dead. Camp O’Donnell was the first prison camp for the men who survived the “Death March”. The picture was taken by James Litton.

The “Cross” was built as a memorial to the thousands who died in that camp. It is as much a part of Bataan as the participants in that battle. The inscription on the base of the “Cross” reads “Omnia Pro Patria”: All For Country. On the wall behind the “Cross” are inscribed the names of the men who died at Camp O’Donnell.

We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan,
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn!”

the poem is by Frank Hewlett, 1942.

That was how they named themselves the “Battling bastards of Bataan”….they were left there, abandoned, much like the boys that Kit and Heidi reported about in their amazing Vietnam research series uncovering the true story of the men of Team 24, F/58th Long Range Patrol (entitled Brother against Brother). The corrolation I see between the two is the military left them vulnerable in a hornet’s nest, with nobody covering their backs. In the case of “Brother Against Brother”, their brothers at arms came to get them out of there. In the case of the Battling Bastards of Bataan, they were forced to surrender to the Japanese.

Ollie North was on tv the other night on his “War Stories” program, and he told the amazing story of the Battling Bastards of Bataan, and their death march, the sadistic brutality these men endured, and the horrible things they witnessed.

One thing about the story that struck me strangely was MacArthur didn’t allow the men to take food with them because of Phillipino law. My husband sat on the couch, saying, “to hell with that! The men come first!” The fact that their rations were cut again and again left them vulnerable to disease and malaria took a strong foothold and disease wiped out many of the men. The conditions were deplorable.

I can’t believe what our guys endured at the hands of the Japanese. I suppose it’s human nature; it was explained that the Japanese didn’t put their brightest bulbs in charge of the POWs. When you have men with huge egos and small brains in power, you can imagine what might end up happening. The Japanese culture of the fighting force was you either take beatings or you give them. They lived up to that with the American POWs.

The orders to fight on all beaches and not supply Bataan were nothing less than the deliberate sacrifice of 31,095 Americans.

North wrote in 2002 some of the parallels between the fight with the Japanese and the fight today in Iraq:

The war they fought began with a sneak attack that killed thousands of Americans. So did this one. The Doolittle Raiders were volunteers. So are those fighting today. They had the Tokyo Rose propaganda. We have Osama bin Laden videotapes. Theirs was the first attack launched by Army aircraft from a Navy carrier, the USS Hornet. In Operation Enduring Freedom, Army pilots flying helicopters from the USS Kittyhawk delivered the first Special Operations strike into Afghanistan. They had colleagues captured and brutally killed by their enemies. That, too, has happened in this fight. Later in their war, suicidal Kamikazes attacked Americans. In this war, that’s already happened. Even the hand-inscribed headbands on today’s “martyrs” look like those worn by the Emperor’s “Divine Wind.”

History is so interesting, and now it looks as though I’ve turned into another history buff like my husband. I used to just walk through the living room when he had these old black and white historical military-related films on, and just keep walking. Now I find myself riveted and learning what I can–and do a lot of reading.

More on the Battling Bastards of Bataan here, here, here, and here.

The story not only depicted the courage of these men and the horrible atrocities they faced after they were abandoned by the US government–but also, the amazing story of the Army Rangers who went into a hornet’s nest among thousands of Japanese warriors who were hell bent on killing torturing and otherwise destroying Americans. The American Rangers successfully rescued over 500 American and Allied prisoners of war from a hellish place in the Phillipines called Cabanatuan…and from what I gather, it’s the largest effort of its kind…against what seemed like impossible odds. The men who went to rescue their brothers were all volunteers for the mission.

By the time this rescue mission was going on, the remaining soldiers were virtually ghosts.

God bless the guys who had the courage to volunteer to go rescue their brothers in the midst of a hornet’s nest of Japanese forces. Unbelievably, there were men on Ollie’s program who had survived and lived to tell the tale.