Day of courage

TODAY is Araw ng Kagitingan. A holi day on a Sunday. One of the tragedies of being a Filipino sometimes is that on days like this we remember the holiday but not the reason why government declares it as such.

This happens especially for holidays linked to events that happened in the very distant past. That is probably why Feb. 25 is fast catching up on April 9, especially under the Duterte administration. We remember the holiday but not the 1986 Edsa revolt.

On April 9, 1942, thousands of sick and exhausted soldiers— the numbers differ but I will use the one used in the book, “The Bataan Death March: World War II Prisoners in the Pacific” by Robert Greenberger, which is 72,000 (62,000 Filipinos and 10,000 Americans)— surrendered to the Japanese invaders.

This was followed by the infamous 105 kilometers “death march” from Mariveles in Bataan to San Fernando in Pampanga where the survivors were hauled by train to Camp O’Donnel in Tarlac. Okay, we need some backgrounders on this one. I use as additional reference the article “Bataan Death March” posted on the website www.history.com.

“The day after Japan bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began. Within a month, the Japanese had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and the American and Filipino defenders of Luzon (the island on which Manila is located) were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula.

For the next three months, the combined US-Filipino army held out despite a lack of naval and air support.” Actually, it wasn’t only naval and air support that the troops in Bataan didn’t have. According to Greenberger’s book, They also lacked food, water, ammunition, clothing and basic supplies.

On Feb. 23, 1942, then US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was also holedup in Corregidor island, that “no immediate help would be coming to the Pacific.” The following month, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave for Australia.

Interestingly, it wasn’t MacArthur who ordered the troops in Bataan to surrender but the Luzon field commander, Maj. Gen. Edward King, who saw that the soldiers were too weak because of hunger and illness (dysentery and malaria).

The move surprised MacArthur and the overall commander after MacArthur left, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright. King negotiated with Japanese military officials in the field for good treatment of his troops and actually was promised it.

But the Japanese, aside from having a different mindset, were also overwhelmed by the sheer number of the soldiers that surrendered. The soldiers were divided into groups of 100 and it took each group around five days to complete the walk to San Fernando. The brutality of the Japanese, “who starved and beat the marchers and bayoneted those too weak to walk” took, took its toll.

Of the 62,000 Filipinos who started the march, 5,000 to 10,000 died. Of the 10,000 Americans who started the march, 650 died. More deaths came (20,000 to 25,000 Filipinos and 1,500 to 3,000 Americans) during their incarceration. Do you wonder now why April 9 has to be commemorated as “Araw ng Kagitingan”?