Bataan Death March survivor made sure others were not forgotten
Rodriguez survived torturous march, spent 3 years in captivity
Ralph Rodriguez Jr., who survived the Bataan Death March in 1942 and then spent almost three years in a hellish prison camp run by Japanese soldiers, died Friday at his home in Albuquerque. He was 100 years old.
The odds of living a long life were stacked against the 77,000 or so ill-equipped Filipino and U.S. soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese to avoid a slaughter at Bataan Peninsula during World War II. More than 5,000 of the captured soldiers died on the 65-mile march to a prison camp. Thousands more would die in wartime camps from disease, starvation, bullets or bayonets.
Rodriguez steeled himself by thinking about survival.
“I didn’t want to die. That’s all there was to it. I didn’t want to die. I was hungry. I was miserable. But not enough for me to say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ ” Rodriguez said in a 2015 interview with The New Mexican.
Rodriguez for years was a presence at Santa Fe’s commemoration of the anniversary of the fall of Bataan, which happened April 9, 1942. He believed it was important to talk about the battle and its aftermath to keep its history alive.
“… Because a lot of his brothers never made it back, he felt a real commitment to remember Bataan and to speak about it,” said his daughter, Mona Lisa Rodriguez.
Ralph Rodriguez was born on Oct. 25, 1917, while his mother was en route from Mexico to El Paso. The family moved to New Mexico when his father took a job as a lumber inspector.
Upon graduating from high school in 1937, Rodriguez began working at a timber company while contemplating college options.
But the Army drafted him into the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment in February 1941, where he served in the medical corps. The soldiers of that regiment were deployed to Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines later that year.
Ina Voces oral history project for the University of Texas at Austin, Rodriguez said he had “an easy life” in the Pacific before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. That surprise attack on a Sunday morning plunged the United States into World War II.
Rodriguez joined some 1,800 other New Mexico soldiers and Filipinos to repel Japanese invaders on the peninsula. The American commander at Bataan gave up, saying
his charges were sure to die in battle.
These captive soldiers, as many as 65,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans, were herded through the jungle in what is known as the Bataan Death March.
Malaria, combat wounds, dehydration, beatings and shootings thinned their ranks. Those who survived the march landed in prisoner-of-war camps, where more violence followed. By war’s end in 1945, just 900 of the New Mexico soldiers returned home.
Rodriguez was one of them. He said he survived in part by using his medical skills to help other men, and in part from reading a Bible he found.
After the war, Rodriguez worked for years at the New Mexico Timber Co. in Bernalillo and later for lumber companies in Utah and Amalia, N.M. He served as a national commander for the American Ex-Prisoners of War Organization and was a member of the Elks Lodge and Knights of Columbus.
He married Elizabeth Gabaldon, who preceded him in death some 35 years ago, and later wed Peggy Welchell, who died three years ago.
Mona Lisa Rodriguez said her father was a modest man who never bragged about what he did during World War II.
“It was something that he had to do,” she said. “He was a hero to us. And he was an American hero.”
Rodriguez also is survived by two sons, Ralph Rodriguez and Charles Rodriguez.
He will be interred at 12:45 p.m. Friday at Santa Fe National Cemetery.
According to the New Mexico Department of Veteran Services, just eight survivors of the Bataan Death March are still alive — six in New Mexico, which had a disproportionate number of its soldiers deployed to the peninsula.