My Hitch in Hell Read online

  MY HITCH

  IN HELL

  MY HITCH

  IN HELL

  The Bataan Death March

  LESTER I. TENNEY

  First Potomac Books paperback edition 2000

  Copyright © 1995 by Potomac Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tenney, Lester I.

  My hitch in hell: the Bataan death march/Lester I. Tenney.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-02-881125-9

  1. Tenney, Lester I. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and

  prisons, Japanese. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives,

  American. 4. Prisoners of war—Philippines—Biography.

  5. Prisoners of war—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  D805.P6T47 1995

  940.54’7252’095991—dc20

  94-23594

  CIP

  Paperback ISBN 10: 1-57488-298-8

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-57488-298-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Printed in Canada

  To the members of Company B, 192d Tank Battalion, both those living and those who died in the defense of their country

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank first Betty, my wife of thirty-four-plus years. She has put up with the idiosyncrasies and problems associated with my frustration, anger, past living conditions, and ill health, all brought on by my years as a prisoner of war.

  I also want to thank my son, Glenn, for his strong support during this project. Since the late 1970s, he has urged me to get my thoughts down on paper or, better still, on my computer’s hard drive. Also, my dear nephew, Si Tenenberg, encouraged me to get it done. He wanted to know more about me and my past experiences; he wanted to learn about my past through reading my history.

  A special thanks goes to my two stepsons, Ed and Don Levi, who never pushed me to tell them what happened, always fearful that recalling some of those horrible events would create difficult emotional problems for me. I also want to thank, of course, my good friend and editor, Carol K. Weed, who saw my manuscript through completion.

  My heart goes out to the families of my many friends who were a part of this experience but did not live long enough to return to freedom. I hereby acknowledge their tremendous contribution to My Hitch in Hell and to the part they played in our ultimate victory.

  Last, I extend my thanks to the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Archives for some of the photos used in this book.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Preface

  1. A Hitch in Company B

  2. Surprise Attack

  3. The Fall of Bataan

  4. The March

  5. Our First Camp

  6. Life with the Guerrillas

  7. Back to Bataan—to Work

  8. Cabanatuan

  9. The Nightmare Ship

  10. The Coal Mine

  11. Camp 17

  12. Fun and Games

  13. “We Honor You with Head Cut Off”

  14. Bombs and Beatings

  15. Our War Is Over

  16. “America and Japan Now Friends”

  17. Looking for the Americans

  18. Meeting My Brother

  19. Back to the Philippines

  20. Home at Last

  21. Japan Revisited

  Appendix

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Lester I. Tenney spent his early twenties transiting, with intelligence and honor, one of the rockiest roads fate has ever dealt a generation of young Americans. A thoughtful Chicagoan of draft age just before World War II, he wanted to serve, but to serve with barracks buddies he felt comfortable with. So he took the trouble to visit the area’s National Guard units like a freshman looking for a fraternity. He selected a Maywood, Illinois, outfit, Company B of the 192d Tank Battalion, and enlisted in October 1940, knowing and excited about the fact that the unit was soon going to be inducted into Federal service. He was going to get his year of military service over in a hurry and get on with business or college.

  But history was already getting into gear in a way that few Americans expected. Lester’s unit was federalized in November ‘40 and arrived in the Philippines exactly a year later. In less than three weeks, at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, a phone call came into their temporary headquarters near Clark Field. “Pearl Harbor has been bombed by the Japs; ‘heads up,’ they’re heading your way!” By noon, the empire’s bombs were enveloping them. American units in the Philippines were in mortal combat. And Company B would remain in combat and/or prison camp for nearly four solid years—spearheading the first American tank battle of World War II in a futile attempt to repel a massive Japanese amphibious invasion of the Philippines at Lingayen Gulf, holding the line in defense of the Bataan peninsula until their unit was surrendered by their commanding general in April ‘42, struggling through the Bataan Death March, and finally enduring brutal Japanese imprisonment in the Philippines and ultimately in Japan itself. This was a three-year and eight-month attrition path that saw only about one man in eight survive. The few that made it were on their last legs when they saw the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, thirty miles from their camp. And those few, including Lester Tenney, stood and cheered as their lives were saved by America’s nuclear bombs.

  What kind of a guy gets through these things and winds up feeling good about himself? This has been my central interest since I traversed a similar, twice as long but less lethal track in North Vietnam (1964-1973). Specifically, what gets you through torture and isolation with self-respect intact? Let Lester Tenney show you in this book. He was brave without being foolhardy, honest to a fault with himself and his countrymen, had the self-discipline to curtail panic, possessed that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism called personal honor, and those gifts he calls “smarts”: having an innate sense of knowing who you can trust, knowing who can take a joke and who can’t, and knowing when it’s prudent to be first in line, or last in line, or in the middle.

  Lester and I were both imprisoned by Asian enemies who disregarded international law in both the proprieties of warfare and the treatment of their captives. In North Vietnamese prisons, though American deaths resulted in individual cases of government-prescribed and -supervised torture for military information of propaganda statements, and barbaric as the process was, the evolution at least proceeded from an external purpose. But in the Japanese prisons of World War II, Americans were subjected to recreational and unsupervised purposeless prisoner bashing. Killing, particularly of the weak and downfallen, was unbridled if not encouraged, and the result was vicious slaughter on a scale unmatched by any other enemy the United States has ever gone to war with. In Vietnam, the individual prisoner was pitted against an extortion machine. In Lester Tenney’s prisons, he was pitted against the whims of uncontrolled, often fanatic, individuals.

  In the letter element, Lester Tenney never went down for the count. More than once, it almost seemed that his ability to absorb punishment evoked in his tormentors sympathy if not admiration for his spirit. Time and again he would be caught in a compromising situation, be tortured for days, stoically resist (he claims his secret was holding on till he got so far out of it he couldn’t grasp what the interrogators were asking), and wind up being dumped back in his camp, limp as a rag, unconscious for hours. Lester never begged for mercy. He knew that’s what the Japanese wanted to hear, and saw with hi
s own eyes instances of where coming across with what they wanted was rewarded with a bullet between the eyes.

  But Lester was also cagey. In an enlightened move, he coaxed language instruction out of gregarious guards and learned to speak what he came to call “gutter” Japanese. Hemmed in in a workhouse prison in Japan, three miles from a once-abandoned coal mine in which he and the other Americans were forced to labor twelve hours a day a half mile beneath the surface, he organized and ran a clandestine free-market trading society. The major currency was Japanese cigarettes; the most heavily traded commodity was rice, but things like American toothpaste and shoes were also available from time to time. As Adam Smith predicted, this economy made everybody better off. Lester even provided for futures trading and bankruptcy protection. Through his acquired language capability he involved Japanese civilian mine supervisors and military guards in this enterprise. He was eventually found out, sentenced to death, and got out of it in a way that will amuse the reader.

  Battered and beaten, this wonderful American left prison and Japan with torture injuries to an arm and a hip long overdue for surgery. Slowly, they were fixed up at home in Chicagoland, where as one would expect, he found both good and bad news.

  But this courageous owner of a fighting heart bounced back to go on to better and better things—to become Lester I. Tenney, Ph.D., retired professor of finance at Arizona State University, and then to be much in demand as a motivational speaker.

  It has been interesting to me to learn how similarly Dr. Tenney and I feel about our lessons learned in battle and behind bars. He says today, “I know without a doubt that my experiences during those trying four years shaped my thinking and my philosophies of life for these past fifty years.”

  I am glad I read this heroic story and proud to have been asked to write this foreword.

  James B. Stockdale

  Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

  Hoover Institution

  Stanford University

  PREFACE

  “In every battle there comes a time when one group of warriors must be sacrificed for the benefit of the whole. . . ,” declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt during one of his fireside radio chats in March 1942. The battle he spoke of was the battle of the Philippines, and the warriors were those fighting American men and women on Bataan and Corregidor. The president’s message was, he would provide no supplies, no reinforcements, no aircraft, no medicine, and no hope for the men and women fighting in the Philippines.

  Up until April 9, 1942, we followed orders and fought the battle for Bataan and Corregidor. We even exceeded our top commanders’ expectations about how long we could keep the Japanese at bay and gave the United States more time to mobilize and strengthen its fighting forces at home and overseas.

  The Japanese high command had planned on capturing the Philippine Islands in just 55 days; however, the Allies’ heroic armed forces in the Philippines held out for 148 days, almost three times longer than expected. Had our commanders so ordered, we would have continued to fight to the last man. But instead, with no food, no medical supplies, no reinforcements, no aircraft, and little ammunition left, we were ordered to surrender.

  It was said best by Gen. Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, on that last day of fighting in the Philippines: “There is a limit of human endurance and that limit has long since passed. Without prospect of relief I feel it is my duty to my country and to my gallant troops to end this useless effusion of blood and human sacrifice.”

  This was the first time in U.S. history that a whole army had to surrender to an enemy. The emotional and physical strain of this decision would last forever for those of us who were taken prisoner and later repatriated.

  We survivors returned with our heads hung low. We had given up, surrendered; we were marked as cowards. We arrived back in the United States quietly, anonymously, without fanfare. There were no banners to welcome us home, no parades to march in, no speeches, and no acknowledgments of any kind. Our folks at home had so many heroes; they were busy welcoming winners, not losers. It was not the time to recognize those who had surrendered. More unfortunate still, many of us returned to find that family members had died and that wives and sweethearts had found other men to take our places. The telegrams, messages, and letters to my mother and dad and to Laura presented in this book are real and are reproduced exactly as originally written; they are an important part of my memorabilia.

  The surrender was not something we were proud of, and it is only normal to keep quiet about those things we are ashamed of. But now, after all these years, I realized that I would be more ashamed of myself if I continued to keep quiet about the events that occurred on the infamous Bataan Death March, the physical and mental abuse, and the degrading and long-term physiological and psychological problems caused by our treatment while prisoners of war (POWs) of the Japanese. I no longer feel embarrassed that I surrendered, and I have finally decided to tell my story of what happened to that once-proud army on Bataan. However, this is not a rancorous book. This is not pleasant, but neither were the times. It is a realistic story of this man’s fight for survival while keeping my ideals and faith intact.

  Shortly after I came home in October 1945, my brother Bill began taking copious notes of everything I said regarding my experiences on Bataan. He questioned me about every detail, and he listened to my stories day after day and on many occasions right into the night. In addition, I was able to bring back dozens of pieces of paper with notes that I wrote while in prison camp. When I determined to write this book, I was able to reconstruct events by consulting these notes, together with hundreds of other items I received from my family and friends, and several hundred pages that I had written many years ago and by being willing to open the door to many painful, long-buried memories. Then, needing only the historical facts of the Philippine campaign, I began the long and tedious job of researching the files of the former War Department and the Department of the Army.

  You may ask why I have decided to tell my story. I have four reasons. First, I find it difficult seeing the history of World War II dramatized and eulogized with little or no reflection on the Philippine campaign. During the fighting on Bataan, there was a saying going around that went something like this: “We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan/no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam/and nobody else gives a damn.” The Bataan Death March and its aftereffects took the lives of more than seventy-five thousand fighting men and women. Our ordeal, however, occurred in the early days of the war and was followed by many other important battles, both on land and at sea, to remember. Since the end of the war, the important Bataan campaign has been pushed into the background. Americans have been bombarded with information dealing with both the European and the Pacific theaters of operations, while at the same time they are largely ignorant about what really went on in the Philippine Islands.

  Second, I still have nightmares of those events fifty years ago. The twelve days described as the “Bataan Death March” and the three and a half years I spent as a POW produced lifelong mental as well as physical scars. Although I still hurt, aging has made me a little more mellow. But regardless of the pain, I believe that the experiences of the past should not be forgotten. The quotation “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” best describes my second reason for writing this book.

  Third, I am angry. I feel I have been humiliated again by the Japanese, but this time I can say and do something about it without fear of retaliation, of a beating, or of other reprisals. Americans are not weak and lazy as several prominent Japanese businessmen and several Nippon government leaders attested in the late 1980s. In addition, Shigeto Nagano, a Japanese justice minister, recently described the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China and the Philippines in the 1930s and 1940s as “fabrications.” He defended the Japanese wartime actions by saying they were attempts to free Asia from Western colonialism. This assertion was followed with a remark by Shin Sakurai, a cabinet member of the Liberal Democratic party an
d the minister of environmental affairs. Japan was not seeking to conquer Asia, he insisted; it was only trying to liberate the countries from Western influence. I cannot allow these attempts by government officials to justify the Japanese aggression and inhumane treatment of soldiers and civilians alike to go unchallenged nor unanswered.

  My last reason for writing this book is to answer the multitude of questions I have been asked over the years regarding what happened on Bataan: “Was it really as bad as they said? Was it anything like the article I read? Did you actually see the incidents described in so-and-so’s book?” My view of each scene, each horrendous experience, and each beating and humiliation was different than that of another person. Things happened so fast that a blink of an eye would bring with it another indelible memory. Camp 17, where I spent almost three years, was acknowledged to have the most brutal and inhumane commander and guards of any camp in all of Japan. This account of my experience will encompass my particular point of view and interpretation of the events that I saw. The events I witnessed and became a part of have never been properly described before.

  These are my reasons for writing this book at this late date: I want the world to know just how we survivors feel, why we do what we do, why we say what we say, and why we live each day as if it is our last. I want my children and my grandchildren to know that war is horrible. Finally, I want them to respect all those who have given so much of themselves to defend the United States.

  There is no doubt in my mind that the Japanese soldiers in this book were made the way they were by the war and therefore did not act as God would wish. I also believe any story of war is a story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. I feel that our hatred surely destroys us spiritually just as the fighting destroys us bodily.

  The tears shed here are for the dead, and my description of the horrors of war are for those who cannot stop hating. The hate shown in this book is intended to reflect man’s inability to deal with reality, and of the love I describe herein, it alone kept me alive and sane.