Local veteran suffered through Bataan Death March

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Superior’s RSVP and Community Outreach group will honor Mineral County veterans on Armed Forces Day, May 20 at the Superior High School. To honor present and past veterans, family and friends have dug through archives and interviewed relatives to find out more about the men and women who have served our country. Veterans from previous wars have been featured in articles and this one is from the personal account of Ernest Lee McKinney.)

After the April 9, 1942, U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II (1939-45), the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. The marchers made the trek in intense heat and were subjected to harsh treatment by Japanese guards. Thousands perished in what became known as the Bataan Death March.

Following are excerpts from the personal account of Mineral County veteran Ernest Lee McKinney.

Dated April 8, 1942 - October 8, 1945

I was inducted in to the Army April 25, 1941. I took basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington with the 116th Medical Regiment which wasn’t my choosing because I had a choice and picked the tanks. In early September 1941 I asked for a transfer to the 194th Tank Battalion. I was transferred to the 194th Tank Battalion Medical Detachment. We were immediately shipped to the Philippine Islands and to the best of my knowledge arrived there late September 1941. We took more training as combat medics and shortly after Pearl Harbor, Clark Field and Fort Stoltenberg were bombed the same day and we took to the field. Shortly all hell broke loose!!

After several delaying actions we dug in and waited for the end, which anyone with normal intelligence knew was inevitable. We made contact with the enemy on several occasions and on April 9, 1942 Lt. General Edward E. King surrendered us unconditionally for what he considered the best thing for us.

At the time of the surrender everyone, including myself was losing weight rapidly and in extreme depression, suffering from malnutrition and in a state of mind that all hope was gone and our chances of surviving were almost nil.

Then began the worst experience a man will ever go through this side of hell; not as prisoners of war, but as captives. To the best of my knowledge we were started on the infamous Death March on April 10th or 11th which was an ordeal most people can hardly comprehend. We were suffering, without food and water and constantly beaten, abused and humiliated by Jap troops that were rushing down the Peninsula to start the siege of Corregidor.

We were moved into stockades in the evenings and no one can visualize or imagine the conditions we were kept in overnight. We were crowded, beaten and kicked into a small enclosure where Philippino troops had been the night before. The Philippino were all suffering from dysentery and had defecated all over and we were forced to sit there all night. It was a veritable hog-pen with urine, feces and dead lying among us.

We were moved out the next morning at double time without food and water. I was sick and feverish and felt no one can be this inhumane but the worst was yet to follow. Gua Gua was a field bordering a river that had many horses, animals and dead Japs and Yanks lying in it. We were told that was the source of our water. So many of us were dehydrated and starved that many of us drank from the contaminated eater. Men were dropping out and could not continue on and were left behind to die or be killed outright.

After a period of three or four days, to the best of my recollection, we were loaded into small steel box cars. We were so crowded in there; there was hardly room to stand. The doors were locked and ventilation so poor along with the human excrement and filth that the men were falling and being trampled underfoot. The march up too this point was much more bearable because we at least had air to breath. The only air came when we were opened up at night.

In or about the first part of June, 1942 I was moved by boxcar and foot to another camp named Camp Cabana Tuan. It was an unfinished Philippino camp similar to the one we had left. Inside camp we were not treated so cruelly, but out on work details we were beaten and made to carry loads that a healthy man would have been unable to carry. All our firewood had to be carried for a distance of four miles.

I was in this Camp Cabana Tuan until about March 1943. I suffered from amebic dysentery in early 1943 and beri beri, a severe pain in the front of the shin bone and very painful feet. Scurvy was very common among all of us, but the Japs gave us a small citrus fruit called a Calamencia, a member of the lime family, which would clear it up quite rapidly. An ulcer on my left ankle became infected and a fissure developed. My leg became severely swollen and the doctors wanted to ship me to the area called a hospital which very few men ever returned from. I begged the doctor not to send me and he saved me, I am reasonably sure.

Eventually the population of Camp O’Donnell was increased to about 6,000 men. The death rate varied sometimes as high as 300 or more a day down to almost none.

America avenged its defeat in the Philippines with the invasion of the island of Leyte in October 1944. General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), who in 1942 had famously promised to return to the Philippines, made good on his word. In February 1945, U.S.-Filipino forces recaptured the Bataan Peninsula, and Manila was liberated in early March.

After the war, an American military tribunal tried Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, commander of the Japanese invasion forces in the Philippines. He was held responsible for the death march, a war crime, and was executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.

In 1948 Pat and Ernest were married in Kettle Falls, Washington. Two children were born to them; Tom who passed in 1991, and Kathy who resides with her husband Ken Verley on Quartz Loop in Superior. Pat McKinney resides at the Village in Missoula. Ernest died of a massive heart attack in 1999.