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Post by JohnEakin on Aug 1, 2012 1:46:00 GMT 8
Great story, Patty. I was reading Abie Abraham's Ghost of Bataan over the weekend and he mentioned Miss U. Without spoiling the story, he gave her a lot of credit.
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Post by pdh54 on Aug 2, 2012 11:35:37 GMT 8
Hi John, Yes, I think she was a remarkable woman.
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Post by pdh54 on Aug 2, 2012 11:45:06 GMT 8
Page 18
Within three days I was on my way to Bataan. The purpose of the expedition, as I said before, was to make a survey for the best location for emergency hospitals for the native population, whose “liberation” by the Japanese had left them in hideous conditions, with the ill lying in the fields and along the roads, dysentery victims everywhere, women having babies without help.......
…..We came at last to the road where the March of Death had taken place. We came so soon after the surrender that the dead bodies were everywhere. There was no evidence that a battle had taken place, yet thousands had died here. Bodies lay all around, some beside the road, some in the rice paddies, some in the ditches. I was sick with shock. I could not believe my eyes.
Every foot of the way brought new horrors. I can not blot out the awful picture of starved dogs tearing at those poor bodies, running off, growling, carrying a man's hand or a whole arm, tearing at his face. The bodies had been stripped of everything of value, even shoes and identification tags. Japanese soldiers were walking around with American wrist watches strapped on their arms all the way from wrist to elbow.
At Abucay there was a bombed church with part of the roof intact, and we decided to put a clinic there. The natives swarmed around us and I asked them why there were so many Americans dead. Then, little by little, they told me the story of the March of Death. For five days and five nights, they said, they had heard the men screaming incessantly. They were beaten with bayonets to make them march faster. They were worn out from the long battle; most of them were sick and almost starved. But they plodded on, some of them dropping right in their tracks. When they fell, the Japanese stabbed them with bayonets and tossed them into the ditches beside the road. Sometimes they left the poor, emaciated bodies in the road and the oncoming trucks ran over them as the lay there.
I saw a spot where thirty wounded men had been tied together with barbed wire run through their hands, then thrown into a barbed wire entanglement and machine-gunned. Another group of thirteen men were so weak they could not walk. They kept falling. The Japanese wired them together with barbed wire and when one fell he dragged the others down. At length, the Japanese pushed them into an open latrine and forced their comrades, at the point of guns, to bury them alive.
Two Filipinos on the March of Death had cans of sardines hidden in their clothes. They opened them and tried to eat. The Japanese chopped off their arms, flung them into the fields, and then slashed them up, cutting them to pieces. They polluted the water and forced the Americans to drink it. As I walked the roads of the stricken area, I noticed small artesian wells that bubbled up on either side. This explained why so many men in that grim procession lay sprawled in the grotesque attitudes of sudden death just off the roads. They had been mad with thirst and had dared to step aside for a drink of water.
After this trip through filth and nightmare, when everything seemed to be festering death, I knew that I could not stop until I had given every ounce of my strength to help the men who still lived. And somewhere among them was Jack. I felt sure of that. Though I had searched and searched among those pitiful dead bodies, I had not found him.
After what those men had endured, nothing seemed too hard or too dangerous. Now I could not think of the Japanese except as beasts, and every weapon or trick that could be used against them seemed not only legitimate but also compulsory.
Our first job was to work out some plan to stop the rising epidemics that resulted from the March of Death and its litter of unburied dead. The Filipinos were starving too, for the Japanese were as destructive as locusts. The first dead body that I saw in Bataan was that of a woman who had been raped to death. In the days that followed we had patients every day, girls from seven years old, who had been raped.
The sight of the living was almost as grim as the pictures of the dead. Wherever I went I found the Filipinos dying by hundreds with dysentery and malaria. We worked feverishly to gather some help for the stricken people. We repaired the schoolhouses and made them into crude emergency shelters, carried the sick and dying into bombed churches rather than let them die naked and alone at the roadside. I saw Filipino families fleeing from the bombed towns, all their pitiful possessions in little carts which the parents pulled in the absence of the horse that had been driven off. Sometimes, laid tenderly on top of the carload of broken bits of housewares or the last measure of rice, would be the body of a child, carried in this way because there was no time to stop and give the small body decent burial, no church in which to say the prayers for the dead, no priest to give comfort...............
Chapter 3 page 24
.…..It was the last Sunday in May when we returned to Manila. That was the day when the last gallant defenders of Corregidor were marched to Bilibid Prison. Near shore they were pushed off the barges in which they were carried, and forced to drag themselves through the water. Exhausted and starved, wet and dirty from that scramble through the surf, they were marched down the boulevard along San Luis, across the Jones Bridge, and through the gates of Bilibid Prison.
I stood on the sidelines, watching that pitiful march. I saw men fall and saw them kicked and beaten with bayonets. A few Filipinos tried to toss cigarettes to the prisoners and were beaten for it, as were the soldiers who tried to catch the cigarettes. As each tired, staggering man came up, I wondered whether the next would be Jack. I didn't know whether I hoped or feared to see him. I could not have helped him. When I did see boys I knew all they could do was to look at me and lift their hands a little. I could not speak to them. That day it was not easy to pretend not to be an American.
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Post by okla on Aug 2, 2012 22:42:25 GMT 8
Hey Patty....Every time I read stories concerning the Bataan Death March, Nanking, etc I reaffirm my determination to never get misty eyed or feel apologetic for our Nation's decision to use the Atom Bomb. I don't give a hoot in Hell how many of the Hollywood elite participate in Hiroshima Anniversary Ceremonies, I will never experience one pang of remorse. These feeble apologies that are forthcoming, infrequently, these days, for the wartime atrocities leave a bit to be desired as far as i am concerned. Only my humble, but that's the way I feel. When Mitsuibishi, etc "ponies up" the back pay owned to the slave laborers taken prisoner in the PI and Singapore, I might have a chance of heart. Cheers.
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Post by pdh54 on Aug 3, 2012 7:40:30 GMT 8
Hi Okla,
I guess I just can't understand how anyone could visit such depravity on others. It made me sick typing those pages and took a little longer than usual to type.
I wonder if this disconnect from humaneness is merely a human trait that exhibits itself over the millenia. I think the Romans and people of those times were just a vicious to a beaten foe.
I do not and will not apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those two bombs put an end to the horrors these men and others were living with. I am also sick of the apologists and their blather. It was WAR and we did not start it. We just finished it.
Gotta go and make dinner now. School just started and I am subbing for an English teacher, 10th and 12th grade for a month. Haha...I'd rather be teaching Algebra but English is fun too. We get to read a lot.
Patty
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Post by fireball on Aug 3, 2012 11:30:14 GMT 8
The attached file (which I found on my computer but am not sure from where) paints a dire picture of what life without those two bombs. Those civilians did not deserve to die, whatever the sins of their countrymen, but I don't think there was any choice. That school class favourite "The Lord of the Flies" portrays all too well the fragile nature of what we call humanity. Attachments:
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Post by pdh54 on Aug 3, 2012 19:06:53 GMT 8
Fireball,
Thank you for the article. It is chilling in its predictions on loss of life for both sides of the conflict. Here is an excerpt, the last part of the article.
An Invasion Not Found in the History Books by James Martin Davis reprinted from the Omaha World Herald, November 1987
At the early stage of the invasion, 1,000 Japanese and American soldiers would be dying every hour. The invasion of Japan never became a reality because on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Within days the war with Japan was at a close. Had these bombs not been dropped and had the invasion been launched as scheduled, combat casualties in Japan would have been at a minimum of the tens of thousands. Every foot of Japanese soil would have been paid for by Japanese and American lives. One can only guess at how many civilians would have committed suicide in their homes or in futile mass military attacks. In retrospect, the 1 million American men who were to be the casualties of the invasion, were instead lucky enough to survive the war. Intelligence studies and military estimates made 50 years ago, and not latter-day speculation, clearly indicate that the battle for Japan might well have resulted in the biggest blood-bath in the history of modern warfare. Far worse would be what might have happened to Japan as a nation and as a culture. When the invasion came, it would have come after several months of fire bombing all of the remaining Japanese cities. The cost in human life that resulted from the two atomic blasts would be small in comparison to the total number of Japanese lives that would have been lost by this aerial devastation. With American forces locked in combat in the south of Japan, little could have prevented the Soviet Union from marching into the northern half of the Japanese home islands. Japan today cold be divided much like Korea and Germany. The world was spared the cost of Operation Downfall, however, because Japan formally surrendered to the United Nations September 2, 1945, and World War II was over. The aircraft carriers, cruisers and transport ships scheduled to carry the invasion troops to Japan, ferried home American troops in a gigantic operation called Magic Carpet. In the fall of 1945, in the aftermath of the war, few people concerned themselves with the invasion plans. Following the surrender, the classified documents, maps, diagrams and appendices for Operation Downfall were packed away in boxes and eventually stored at the National Archives. These plans that called for the invasion of Japan paint a vivid description of what might have been one of the most horrible campaigns in the history of man. The fact that the story of the invasion of Japan is locked up in the National Archives and is not told in our history books is something for which all Americans can be thankful. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When I think of the potential aftermath of an invasion of Japan, and I'm looking at years down the road, I shudder. Our world as we know it now and for the last 60 years would be nonexistent. Most of the men in that generation would have been killed. My generation would have been gutted of the people who made things as they are now.
It is regrettable that those Japanese civilians died in the bombing, but unfortunately people suffer when they follow leadership that lacks concern for them on the path to the leader's unreasonable goals.
Where in the world did the Japanese get the idea that the rest of the people in the world would just sit idly by and allow them to conquer that part of the world? This was not the Dark or Middle Ages where lack of military sophistication allowed mass migration of peoples, each part of Europe an enclave unto itself after Rome's demise. The world is too vast with too many different cultures for "world domination" to proceed.
Thank you Bob for putting up Margaret's photo, making her story a little more personal.
I must get going to school now, so again I thank you Fireball for posting this very informative article.
Patty
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Post by okla on Aug 3, 2012 22:43:43 GMT 8
Hey Patty...What a diverse, and I am sure excellent teacher, you must be. Molding little minds into such differing subjects, Mathematics and The Humanities. I am confident, though, that you would have met your match (and then some) had you had yours truly in your Math class. I floundered from Elementary School Arithmetic, thru High School Algebra/Geometry and College Algebra I & II. I was so elated with rooting out a C minus in College Math one would have assumed that I had been accepted at Oxford. I never did quite get it that a History/Political Science Major had to have 6 hours of Math and 5 Hours of Chemistry or Physics to receive his BA.. Those subjects ain't my "bag", but they, along with some Biological Sciences, were still required, I don't care if you were in Art Classes majoring in drawing nudes,etc. Anyhow, enjoy the kiddies, but don't ditch your newly acquired "addiction" to the "Rock". Cheers.
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Post by pdh54 on Aug 12, 2012 6:51:59 GMT 8
“Miss U” page 24
“The next day I had my first encounter with the Japanese. Lee and I were in a carromata (a two-wheeled cart) on our way to the post office. All at once two Japanese began to run after us shouting.
“I guess they want the cart,” I told the cochero. “They can have it.”
Lee got down and I jumped out of the cart, right beside the Japanese. Without any warning they began to beat me. First they struck me with their fists, knocking me again and again against the wheel of the cart. Then they kicked my shins with their hobnailed boots, dragging the soles of the boots down my legs until the nails had torn almost all of the skin off them.
Lee stood helplessly on the sidewalk, looking like death. Anything he could have done would only have made things worse. Then I saw a truckload of American soldiers. They had been stopped and were being forced to watch the beating. That accounted for the attack on me. The Japanese wanted to make them watch me suffer. When I realized what the point was, I made up my mind that I wouldn't cry if they killed me.
For fifteen minutes the beating went on and the American prisoners just looked. There was nothing they could do, nothing they could say.
At last the truck was ordered on and the beating stopped. I was a mess, my body just a pulp of bruised, and my legs torn and bleeding. With Lee's help I climbed back into the waiting carromata. Lee's poor eyes were full of tears. “Oh, Miss Peggy, more better they whip me. More better they whip me.”
This was not time to let myself go and say what I felt, so I answered brusquely, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go.” And we went on to the post office.
Lee had set himself the job of looking after me and it was no cinch. With my husband gone and my son Charles in America, he regarded the problem of my safety as his own special tack. He had tried to keep me from going to Bataan. “I very scare,” he had told me. And finally, as a last resort he had added, “Miss Peggy, if you get hit with bomb, what I say to Mr. Charley; he no like that at all.” I had to laugh.
Then he had put his hand over his heart. “Do you feel – here - you must go?” he demanded. I nodded. So he had nodded his head reluctantly. If that was the case, then I must go...................
…..A second Red Cross expedition was being sent to Bataan and, of course, I wanted to go. There was work to be done there, far more work than there were people to do it, and a chance that I could make some contact with the American prisoners. This time Dr. Gann was to remain behind in Manila, and the relief mission was to be handled by Dr, Romeo Atienza. Dr Gann met with the group before our departure to explain what had to be done and to be sure that everyone understood just what he and she was getting into. And then I had a bad moment.
“You know," Dr. Gann remarked, “several people have told me about some white woman being pulled out of a carromata and beaten badly by the Japanese. A truckload of American soldiers saw the whole affair.”
I acted very surprised. No, I had never heard of the case. Rumors were always going around but I paid little attention to them. It was hard to look Dr. Gann blandly in the eyes because I could hardly resist the impulse to look down and see whether the scars on my legs still showed through my stockings. I dared not let the Red Cross get any hint that I was the woman. If the suspected for a moment that anything had happened to me or was likely to happen to me, they would never dare to take me along.
There were more bad moments on that trip. One of the mestiza nurses, Doris Robinson, knew me and sat next to me in the truck as we started for Bataan.
“Where is your husband?” she whispered.
“I am Miss Utinsky.” I said quickly.
“I understand.” she said, and never again referred to knowing me in the past.
This time the trip was less like a journey through hell. We hastily set up tents for our living quarters – sleeping quarter, actually, for we were so frantically busy that we never had time to enter them except to sleep.............
There was so much work to do that we simply had to do the impossible every day. We took over a bombed school at Caligaman. It was filthy beyond description. For weeks people had been lying there, the sick, the dying, the dead. They had slept and eaten and defecated there. And that was where we must establish a hospital by nightfall.
I drove people like an avenging fury. We carried out the people, swept, cleaned, disinfected, built bamboo cots and by dark we had our patients in it, a functioning hospital.
There was so much to do and so few of us to do it. Dr. Romeo Atienza and his wife, who had come along to supervise the meals, were fine people and I learned within two days that they were staunchly pro-American when he told me that he hoped to find a place to work where he could establish contact with the American prisoners and help them. The Red Cross, of course, was supposed to be giving assistance only to the Filipinos. Certainly, the Red Cross need not have feared that the rest of their doctors would help any Americans; they did not exert themselves to help anyone. With the exception of Dr. Atienza they were not even physicians, just dentists who were not prepared to be of much use, and who sat around most of the time playing mahjong...............
…..So far as the American prisoners were concerned, I seemed to be as far from establishing contact with them in Bataan as I had been in Manila. If I stuck to the hospitals we had set up, I never would see any Americans, so I applied for the job of field nurse. There was only one privilege granted the prisoners on Bataan. Every few days, several of them would be allowed to leave their prison and go foraging for a little rice or carabao meat, and they could stay out until five o”clock without risking a beating. If I was going to find them I'd have to be out in the field..................
…..So I opened a clinic in Abucay to reduce the press of cases at other points and so that we could give the badly needed care as quickly as possible. Those people were living at just about the lowest possible level, with the flimsiest shelters for homes, with subsistence food, with no medical care. And I plunged in. But I didn't forget that my main object was the Americans and whenever I heard a truck rumbling by, I would look out.
And then came the red-letter day. I was walking along the road when a truck came along. I jumped into the ditch and looked carefully but I saw no one but an American soldier at the wheel. Soldier? He looked like a baby to me, he was so pitifully young.
“Any bedbugs around?” I asked. That was the usual term applied to Japs when prisoners were able to talk to each other and wanted to keep their reference to their captors private. He shook his head, too surprised to speak. The sight of a white woman, and an American woman, walking around free was more than he could take in.
“Where are you from?” I asked, meaning, of course, which prison.
“I'm from Arkansas,” the boy drawled.
I had been on my way to the Red Cross tent and the boy stopped the truck there. His name, he told me, was Marvin Ivy, and he was eighteen years old - and one month, he added, feeling the extra month lent him dignity. Lt. Colonel John Shock and Captain Andrew Rader were in the tent now, trying to get medicine and supplies for the sick prisoners. They had been out since early morning but no one would take the risk of giving them any supplies.
I marched boldly into the tent where the two American officers were talking with the members of the Filipino Red Cross.
“Hello Captain,” I said casually.
Captain Rader looked at me for a moment, swallowed, and then answered as though it were the most natural thing in the world for us to meet there, 'Oh, Hello.”
The two men looked half starved and broken in spirit. “When you've finished your talk,” I said, “I'll bring your soup.”
They pushed back their chairs. “It looks like we're finished here,” Captain Rader said bitterly, and the two men followed me out.
I dashed back and heated soup and got crackers, corned beef sandwiches and coffee. They at ravenously..
“What is the trouble?” I asked.
“We need drugs desperately. The men are sick and they aren't getting any care.”
“I'll get them for you,” I promised. “You wait here.”
While they ate, I collected sulfa drugs for dysentery, 8000 Brewer's yeast tablets, nearly a case of soup, five pounds of cocoa and crackers. They didn't ask where I got them. I explained that I alternated between Santa Lucia and Abucay. “When you see the Red Cross flag, I'll be there.”
They told me that Colonel James Duckworth, who had done two men's work in the hospital during those terrible days on Bataan, was ill, but he had sent them out to beg for drugs. In a few days he would send three more men.
“See if you can bring me a complete list of the prisoners, will you?” I asked. “Those who have died, those who are ill, all of them.”
They promised that they would try, and I felt that I had taken my first concrete step. At least, I had made contact with the Americans.
Unfortunately, the Red Cross official who had been in the tent with the American officers when I sailed in also knew about that contact. The next morning he was off for Manila and when he came back he brought another man with him who came looking for me at once, I knew then that Dr. Canuto had turned me in for helping the Americans and that I was to be sent back.
“I had better pack up my bits and pieces,” I told Doris Robinson. And then I got mad with myself for being defeated so easily.
The man from Manila turned out to be rather nice. “Been working hard?” he asked me.
“We all have,” I said shortly.
“I am sorry but I have to take you back to Manila.”
“Do you always do what you have to do?”
He smiled. “Nearly always.”
“Not this time,” I told him. “I was never hired by the Red Cross so then cannot fire me. I volunteered. If the Red Cross doesn't want me, the natives do. I have taken care of a lot of them. Nor one would refuse to take me in.” The more I thought about it the madder I got. “Off the record, who turned me in?”
“Dr. Canuto – for aiding American prisoners.”
“Of course,” I said cautiously, “I'm not an American, as you know. But after all, these boys came out to fight for the Filipinos. And yet if anyone wants to give them a few drugs to keep them alive, you want him removed. You go back and tell Dr. Canuto I won't leave Bataan until I am damned good and ready and that will be when there’s not another American left here.” Well, he shook hands with me and he went back to Manila and resigned from the Red Cross.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 12, 2012 7:13:38 GMT 8
I am glad to see there is still so much interest in Margaret's story. I am writing a book about her and some of the other American women (including Claire Phillips) who were involved in anti-Japanese work during the war. I've already written a little bit about them in my first book, Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific. For Margaret's part of the story, I am always interested in learning more about Corregidor.
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