Read Online Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling - Free Book Online

combat, so rough in fact that some of his fellow trainees had committed suicide rather than endure it. He said he hated the British, but about Americans he was silent. From this manner I guessed that he was opposed to the war and not sanguine about its ultimate outcome.
    After a few days the guards got better control of things and our regimen became appreciably tougher. Instead of straggling in small groups or even alone, we were now marched in large groups, three abreast, on the left side of the road, so southward bound Japanese vehicles to our right would not be impeded. It was now, too, that the real atrocities began, at least where I was. Guards trotted up and down the columns clubbing men into line with rifle butts, stabbing laggards with their bayonets, and shooting or bayoneting to death anyone chronically unable to keep up, all this accompanied by a fusillade of verbal abuse. Our captors, who had been taught that to become a prisoner of war was a disgrace, repeatedly taunted us with accusations of cowardice and sneered at our inability to keep pace. Heartbreaking acts of savagery multiplied. One poor fellow behind me jumped into a stream as we crossed a bridge. A guard raised his rifle tohis shoulder and waited. As soon as the man surfaced, he was shot in the back. Another time I saw what was left of a human body after it had been run over by a tank on a hard-surfaced roadbed. It looked like a wet sack. I saw many men bayoneted and then abandoned to suffer a slow, agonizing death in the dust. I watched a general being clubbed until he was a bloody, unrecognizable mess. As for myself, I was clubbed many times for no reason other than sheer malice.
    So we stumbled along, mile after mile, through heat and dust, tortured by hunger, thirst, diseases, and the accumulated effects of three months on short rations. The popping of .25-caliber Japanese rifles grew more frequent as more and more men proved unable to maintain the pace of the march. After a while nobody even looked back to see who had been shot this time. Only once did I see a Japanese officer so much as reprimand a guard for brutality. In that case the guard had deliberately crushed the glasses of a man whom I happened to know, a forty-five-year-old sergeant, William T. Moore. The officer grabbed the guard and knocked him down with a blow from his fist—one of the commonest modes of enforcing discipline in the Japanese army.
    Night was, if anything, worse than daytime. We would simply be herded into a field and enclosed with barbed wire. It resembled nothing as much as putting cattle into a corral, save that our plight was sorrier. Since it was near the end of the dry season, the fields were mere bare ground and dust, without grass. Here thousands of men, without food or water, were packed in so closely that one could not shift his body without causing discomfort to others. Worse, there were no toilets, and by now maybe a third of us had dysentery. There we lay in mind-numbing squalor, soaked in our own body wastes and those of others, waiting for dawn to resume the man-killing march.
    Judging from what I have heard and read since World War II, our captors must have handled the distribution of food more humanely in other parts of the march than where I was. Bob Mailheau says that on a couple of occasions he and a few others simply walked up to a Japanese cook and made motions indicating that they were hungry, after which they were given some rice. I was not so lucky. I was fed a little rice on the day I was put to work digging foxholes. For seven days after that the Japanese offered us no food at all in regular chow lines. All of us would have died had not the general disorganization that prevailed for three or four days enabled us to scrounge a little food in various ways. When the guards were few and otherwise occupied, we could sometimes dig up a few
camotes
(Philippine sweet potatoes) in fields. Now and then a friendly Filipino would furtively hand or