Free War Stories II by Oliver L. North Page B

the living would envy the dead.
    By 24 April, more than 54,000 American and Filipino prisoners were crammed into an area of less than one square mile in western Luzon. The captives called this hellish place Camp O’Donnell. The Japanese called it a “prisoner processing center.”
    Malnourished and weak, many prisoners were too feeble to even go inside huts and were laid out on palm-frond mats. There was scant shade; the sun beat down upon them unmercifully. As they lay in their own feces, ravaged by swarms of flies and mosquitoes, they were plagued by malaria, gangrene, dysentery, typhoid fever, and other tropical diseases the doctors had never seen before. Men began dying at the rate of fifty a day. And then things got worse. Within six weeks, one of every six Americans who had survived the Death March was dead.
    When they could, the POWs would bury the deceased. But it was the beginning of the rainy season and the torrential downpours constantly washed the bodies out of the shallow graves. The Japanese guarding the prison didn’t seem to care. They had built Camp O’Donnell as a place from which they could ship “healthy” POWs to Japan and Manchuria as slave laborers. Those too weak or wounded to be shipped out were simply moved a few miles farther into the jungle to other camps, like the infamous Camp Cabanatuan, to await death or release. Few dared hope of escape or rescue.

    SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942

    The day after the surrender, the Japanese got us up at the crack of dawn and started marching us north, in groups of about 300 at a time. It was
every man for himself. A lieutenant colonel had been wounded and he was unable to stand. They put him on a stretcher and asked for volunteers to carry him. I was one of four who carried that man all day long. We kept asking for relief, because it was hot and getting hotter. No one came near us to relieve us. When we put that man down that night we went in four different directions, because we knew that the next day, if we were still on the detail, we would not physically be able to make that march.
    I think that the Japanese made sure they didn’t let units march together. Units are much more difficult to control than a loose group of prisoners. Generally speaking, they didn’t allow that to happen, and just broke up our military units.
    One loose group of 300 would lead the first day, and another group would lead the next. We wondered how the Japanese would treat us. What they had done in China had been played on newsreels almost nightly in Manila theaters. We saw what they did to Chinese women and soldiers—raping, beheading, shooting—so we knew what they were capable of. But naively, we didn’t think that we would have to suffer that inhumane treatment as Americans. But we did.
    When General King had tried to arrange to use our own vehicles to transport us out of the Bataan area, the Japanese refused.
    They gave us no food at all. Some may have gotten a rice bowl somewhere, but not in my case. They would not let you break ranks to go for water. They would allow stops for water, but they were few and far between. So as a result, men would break ranks and go to some stagnant pool on the side of the road and begin to drink. And the Japanese would yell, get them back in ranks—or if they wouldn’t get in ranks fast enough, they shot them.
    In my case, training was the difference between my survival and perhaps not surviving, because I had been trained in how to preserve water. I had one canteen, and I would put a little of that water in my mouth, swish it around, get a little trickle down my throat, and spit the rest back into my canteen. Hardly Emily Post etiquette, but an effective way to keep what water you had.

    But most of these men came overseas untrained and not acclimated to the Philippine climate. They couldn’t tolerate it. The sun in the