Chapter 5, The Battle of Bataan

Bataan was not a routine early-war defeat for the U.S. Army. The Battle of Bataan has the distinction of resulting in the surrender of the largest American fighting force in the history of U.S. warfare. But numbers do not necessarily describe defeat. The real winner of an engagement may well be the one who inflicts the most damage; and according to this combat criterion, the greater loss was Japan's. It was rather like the Alamo when, after the battle, one of Santa Ana's generals surveyed the carnage and said to him, "One more victory like this and we're finished." The Japanese paid dearly for the privilege of raising the Rising Sun over the Bataan peninsula.

It is sadly recorded that on December 7, 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on American territories in the Pacific. Among the chief targets were Hawaii, now a state, and the Philippines, now an independent nation.

While Japan's planes bombed Pearl Harbor, her ships went to the Philippines and disembarked a huge invasion force consisting of several hundred thousand men. The prize they sought was the port city of Manila.

Manila was situated at the innermost point of Manila Bay in what might be described as the bottom of a bottle. To get to Manila by sea, the Bay-bottle had to be navigated. The right side of the bottle was the large Luzon landmass; the left side was the narrow, twelve-mile-wide Bataan peninsula. The bottle's long neck was only a few miles wide, and in the middle of its opening lay a small waterless rock called Corregidor.

In order for their Navy to enter Manila Bay and dock at the port of Manila, the Japanese had to take both the heavily jungled Bataan peninsula and the rock of Corregidor.

Deciding on a classic pincers maneuver, the Japanese army advanced overland and took the City of Manila, cutting off the Bataan peninsula. This inland thrust severed all lines of supply to the American and Filipino defenders of the peninsula. It also caused thousands of civilian refugees to stream southward into the defensive positions.

Having secured the north of the peninsula, the Japanese placed their warships off the west and south and proceeded to pound American positions from the sea while simultaneously launching amphibious attacks on coastal defenses. Then, there being no American warplanes of any kind in the area, unopposed Japanese warplanes bombed targets at will as thousands of Japanese soldiers pressed down from the north.

General Douglas MacArthur, ordered to defend both Corregidor and Bataan, foresaw the inevitable and said, "Well, the enemy may hold the bottle, but I hold the cork."

The Japanese regarded the guns of the cork - Corregidor's famous cannons - as a joke. With amusement they noted that the guns had been cast in the year 1896 and could not even rotate on their mountings. Japanese weapons of war represented, on the other hand, the absolute state of the art.

With American supply lines cut off and the additional drain on resources by the refugees, all stores of food and medicine were quickly depleted. The defenders of Bataan and Corregidor did not have enough of anything to last for more than thirty days.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita estimated that the peninsula would be in Japanese hands within two weeks. It should have been. It wasn't.

When December... January... February... passed with huge

Japanese casualties and no dent in the American defensive positions, the general, furious and in serious danger of losing face, requested and received thousands of fresh troops.

The American forces, however, received nothing. Throughout the entire siege they received no military support of any kind nor any resupply of food or medicine. As the weeks dragged on they battled not only the enemy but malaria, dengue fever, hookworm, amoebic dysentery, beriberi, scurvy, infected war wounds, and, of course, starvation.

Cavalry, they ate their horses and mules, and when these were gone, they ate snakes and rats and whatever else they could scavenge. Their Japanese attackers were on full rations.

And so with no relief, no resupply, and not a single word of hope from home, the defenders of the strategic entrance to Manila Bay rightly considered themselves military orphans. In a now-famous poem one GI wrote:

"We are the battling bastards of Bataan.
Ain't got no mommas, no pappas, no Uncle Sam.
Ain't got no nephews, no nieces, no artillery pieces.
Ain't got no one out there who gives a damn."

The American people gave a damn... they just couldn't do anything about it. Every night on the news came the reports the battle... of the suffering and the bravery... and all people could do was bite their knuckles and pray.

Then, in March, after months of relentless naval and aerial bombardment and the hand-to-hand combat of wave upon wave of amphibious and land assaults, the Japanese began to penetrate American lines with suicide squads.

Still, March came and went and the Americans and Filipinos fought on. Despite their exhaustion, disease, starvation and the utter hopelessness of their cause, they fought on.

And in the face of this uncommon valor, on April 1st, General Yamashita sent his airplanes to drop canisters on the American positions. Inside each canisters was the following note:

"To His Excellency, Major General Jonathan Wainwright:

We have the honor to address you in accordance with Bushido - the code of the Japanese warrior. You have already fought to the best of your ability. What dishonor is there in following the example of the defenders of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies? Your Excellency: Accept our sincere advice and save the lives of those officers and men under your command. International law would be strictly adhered to."

Yet, for more than a week afterwards, the American and Filipino defenders continued to fight until they were finally overrun and forced to surrender on April 9, l942. The four- month siege had ended.

Estimates of the number of survivors vary. The Japanese captured some fifty or sixty thousand men. Though announcing that they would adhere to the life-respecting rules of Bushido, they instead gave the survivors only one canteen of water each, no food or medicine whatsoever, and forced them to march the sixty-five mile length of the Bataan peninsula in the tropical heat. A postwar count revealed that 25,000 American and Filipino prisoners died on the road, many of them with their hands still tied behind them, their heads lopped off or their backs bayoneted, the penalty for begging for water. This was the infamous Death March of Bataan.

When a Time Magazine correspondent later asked General Wainwright why he had waited a week before surrendering... why he hadn't accepted General Yamashita's promise to adhere to the principles of Bushido, General Wainwright replied that he knew all about Bushido. He new how the Japanese had treated their Chinese prisoners of war. "I therefore gave the offer all the answer it deserved," he said. "I ignored it."

After the war, General MacArthur oversaw the American occupation of Japan. It is a measure of his greatness that he succeeded completely in his mission to restore the dignity and the economy of that defeated nation. But he remembered Bataan. He remembered Bushido. And as generous as he was to the Japanese, he absolutely forbade them to practice any of the martial arts covered by Bushido's code. All secular martial arts' clubs were disbanded. (He allowed only one exception: pacifistic, defensive Aikido.) Even Zen Buddhist monks were forbidden to practice any of the routine exercise "forms" of the disciplines. Anything related to Bushido was seen to be at the core of a disgusting, subhuman, fanatical, warrior cult. It didn't matter that the Japanese military had never really taught the Code much less observed it.. that they had merely pirated its benevolent mystique much as the Nazis had plundered the mystique of the Swastika, Buddhism's other goodwill icon. These deliberate subversions of Buddhism's reputation had been intended to con the world into believing that the intentions of those who used them were entirely as noble as any ancient Aryan had ever dreamed of being. The world was slow to recover from the ruse.

Post World War II saw a burst of international cultural exchanges. The French ate hamburgers. Americans ate Pizza and imported Yoga and Indian forms of worship. But not Buddhism nor the martial arts. Americans wanted no part of either of them.

China could have exported Buddhism and Gong Fu, but nothing was coming out of China. Nationalists and Communists were fighting a civil war that would close China for decades. It was not until the late l950s, after the Korean Conflict, that American prejudice against Buddhism and the martial arts had lessened sufficiently to tolerate their import. And when they came they, of course, came separately.

Zen Buddhism and the martial arts had been officially divorced.

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