Free War Stories II by Oliver L. North

bayonet practice. He was bare from the waist up, and blood was still spurting out of the wounds.
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    Bataan Death March

    The Japanese took us to a staging area, an assembly point for thousands of our soldiers, and threw us into this enclosure. At this time I lost contact with Elmer Parks, and didn’t find him again for forty years.
    When they threw us into this stockade it was the middle of the night and pitch dark and you couldn’t see anything. And there were thousands of men all over the place, lying down out of sheer exhaustion. There was no order or discipline, just thousands of men lying in an open field. There were no latrines, and the men who were wounded or who had malaria or dysentery just relieved themselves where they lay. The place was covered with feces and was a terrible mess. I found a place and lay down, waiting for the night to pass.

    PRIVATE ANDREW MILLER, US ARMY
Nichols Field, Philippines
6 May 1942

    After the first air attacks in December, we were moved from Nichols Field to Bataan—a peninsula with Manila Bay on one side and on the other side was the South China Sea. The Harbor Defense Group and their big guns on four different islands in the mouth of the bay protected the entrance to the bay. Corregidor was the biggest and best fortified of these islands. The idea was to hold out until the Navy could escort ships over to support us. Well, it never happened.
    When my unit got sent to Bataan we were positioned at about kilometer mark 133. I guess you’d call it the front line, but the Japs called it the main line of resistance. The Jap offensive started on 3 April on our left flank. They never shot where we were at all. They’d send an occasional artillery round just to let you know that they knew you were there. On the night of 6 April the medics came in and took the men who had malaria the worst back to one of the hospitals.
    On the afternoon of the eighth, we were on a hill, and they weren’t too far away from us, and quite a few men got hit. For some of the men
the only thing we could do was ease their pain with a shot of morphine, because there was no way you could save them.
    But the sun finally came up and somebody told us that they were trying to arrange a surrender. Well, we didn’t think that was such a good idea. So we made it down to the beach and found an outrigger canoe. Then we started out for Corregidor, which was not such a smart move. The tide was going out, and there’s a current in the bay. We got out about a quarter mile or so, looked over to Corregidor, and saw nothing but smoke and dust. We looked back at Bataan and it was the same thing—a lot of fire, everything was a mess. Airplanes were all over the place. Looking out in the bay [we could see] silhouettes of the Jap navy out there. You couldn’t go to Manila, and the water was full of sharks.
    I escaped, and got over to Corregidor. My hunch was right. They had more food over there and it was much better. I stayed for almost four weeks, until Corregidor surrendered.

    PRIVATE JOHN COOK, US ARMY
Fort McKinley Base Hospital
9 April 1942

    Three days before the surrender, the Japanese launched a big offensive with a lot of air and artillery strikes. I was on the front line, up on a lookout tower, about fifty feet up on this platform built between two trees. It was in the morning and I was supposed to give a warning with a siren if the Jap planes came over. But they came in over Mount Mariveles, in the sun, about 9:30 and they dropped a 550-pound bomb and blew up eighty-eight people in the hospital ward even though it was marked with a big red cross.
    We worked for three days and nights without sleep, and the night before the surrender the nurses were ordered on a bus and aboard a barge for Corregidor.
    When we got the order to surrender, the medics at Hospital Number One used a piece of white sheet and Colonel Duckworth had the folded-up
flag, and on top of that he had his web belt