The Fall of the Philippines: A Reminiscence of World War II

Ray Griffiths.

The Fall of the Philippines: A Reminiscence of World War II

BY RAYGRIFFITHS

RAY GRIFFITHS JOINED THE ARMY TEN MONTHS before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippine Islands where he was stationed. He fought in the American retreat down the Bataan peninsula; and when others were taken prisoner and sent on the one-hundred-mile Bataan Death March, Griffiths made his way to the island fortress of Corregidor where he continued to fight for another month. When Gen. Jonathan Wainwright was forced to surrender Corregidor on May 7, 1942, Griffiths, along with 15,000 other American and Filipino defenders of the fortress, were taken prisoner by the Japanese. In this excerpt from an interview with Robert Tesch, conducted on September 6, 1971, Griffiths recounts the fight to defend the Philippines, the food shortages and disease that plagued the American army, his treatment during forty-two months of captivity by the Japanese, his self-liberation in Japan, and his return to the United States His account depicts the horrors of war in graphic detail. Unlike most soldiers who had had enough of army life by the end of the war and were anxious to resume their lives as civilians, Griffiths chose to remain in the army He retired as a sergeant major to his home in Sunset, Utah, after a distinguished military career.

I enlisted in the Army on the 12th of February 1941 ... at Fort Douglas, Utah, and was sent to Angel Island . . . in . . . San Francisco Bay, and then on the first of April .. . I went to the Philippine Islands . . . Corregidor We hit there in the hot season and there had been no rain for months Everything was brown I imagine the temperature was over a hundred degrees. Most of the time it was . . . out on the drill field. . . . Sergeants screaming all over, training us.

Just prior to the start of the war we were reassigned. I was with the 60th Coast Artillery and an antiaircraft unit We were assigned to a communications position and . . . left Corregidor on the third of December 1941. We arrived on Bataan the same day. My brother [Lloyd Griffiths] was with me on Corregidor until I was sent to Bataan. It's only four and one-half miles across the bay We took up positions on Bataan after we'd taken machetes and chopped our way into the jungle and made ourselves a home We had to set up tents there. It was actually [December 8] ... in the Philippines that our company commander called us together in the mess area and announced that we were in a state of war with Japan. I think most of us knew it was coming, but we didn't know when.

Most of the troops were ill prepared as far as equipment was concerned. Though we had a lot of ammunition . . . the weapons. . . . were of real old vintage World War I types, and the antiaircraft guns were not capable of reaching the Japanese horizontal bombers. A lot of the ammunition was so old that it actually was defective. It wouldn't even fire, and [with] the hand grenades, for example, you might get a "kill" out of every five It had been in warehouses since 1916 and 1917.

Thejapanese came ashore in the Philippines at Subic Bay [on Luzon at Lingayen Gulf—the first group near Davao on Mindanao two days earlier]. There were eighty transports full of Japanese troops and that made the odds about 19 or 20 to 1 American We had a lot of Philippine troops, both the scouts and constabulary They seemed rather inadequate, especially the constabulary. They were like a reserve force, and they really didn't have adequate training. General MacArthur [had] started to train these people late in 1940. Though he made a real effort in that short period of time, they just weren't ready. The scouts were very valiant people. They tried hard, but the constabulary, being just civilians brought into the military, . . . were frightened; they were young, and they weren't very well equipped. They had the old Enfield rifle. We had the old Springfield rifle. While our arsenals were full of the Ml rifle, the Grand modern rifle, we still had the old Springfield bolt-action rifle.

With these eighty transports of Japanese, our commanders tried to call in navy submarines, airplanes, and so on, but it was futile because we just didn't have them. The PT fleet tried to come in . . . and . . . were turned back because of the Japanese navy. . . . The Japanese kept advancing with superior air, superior artillery, superior numbers. . . .

We would dig in every five kilometers and then ... go back . . . [and] the fresh forces, the reserves, would take the brunt of the attack while we dug in five kilometers to the rear. It was an effective method of delaying, but people were already saying that you couldn't defend the Philippines. They finally went down from Bataan and gathered up medics, finance people, ordnance people, quartermaster people, army air corps people, and navy personnel—we had a navy battalion trained as infantry They picked up everybody that they could, gave them a rifle, [a] minimum amount of instruction, and then they became infantry and they were all put up on the front lines.

They were claiming that Corregidor was impregnable Generally speaking, morale in American fighting men then was high, though later on [it suffered] When the food started to disappear we were fed twice a day, early morning and late at night, with a can of water to survive on all during those hours Then malaria, dysentery, malnutrition started to take its toll Cholera [and] every kind of disease that's with ajungle we would contract.

I think the thing that bothered us the most was the fact that we didn't have enough niceties We could live on rice and gravy and meat, but we didn't have a can of beer or pop or the cigarettes we wanted All these things you had to find or catch up with You could go out and trade For example, you could trade a carton of cigarettes for a brand new Garand rifle This was a rifle that fired eight rounds semi-automatic, just as fast as you could pull the trigger The Filipinos had these; we didn't This bothered us quite a bit Also you could find food, but we needed things like sugar and better logistical support We got soap We weren't actually filthy we were able to wash [but] we ran out of toothbrushes and things of this nature. . . . Then came the [radio] announcer from San Francisco telling thejapanese that you can't bomb Corregidor; it's impregnable. Go ahead and bomb . . . if you can. . . . We loved to hear the music and we liked to hear the news, but we really didn't want anybody boasting about how superior we are when we were getting our tail whipped. .. . If they'd have told it like it was . . . and if we could have got some support. . . good fighting troops with modern weapons and ammunition. We really didn't mind going without food, but . . .just the fact that somehow they could find bundles for Britain and [only] a schnitzel [chip] for Bataan, that's the way we figured it.

The Japanese broke through and were coming across the airstrip and it looked like ants crossing the sidewalk We pulled the antiaircraft guns . . . out with tractors and laid them on the road and just direct fired. . . . They throw steel balls, flak, and we were busting these flak charges right over their heads about twelve feet off the ground and . . . knocking them down like flies and they came right across again in force screaming "Banzai." There's a . . . ridge on Bataan that the Americans or the allied forces got credit for killing 35,000 Japanese in ten days They stacked up . . . fence and barbed wire entanglement. The Japanese bridged that wire with their bodies screaming at the top of their lungs always And after ten days we withdrew because [of] . . . the stench of the bodies of the Japanese We couldn't stand the smell—you had to put your gas mask on to breathe—and the huge blowflies. If you had a scratch on your body, you had to get it treated so those blowflies wouldn't give you big tropical ulcers. . ..

It was a nightmare We all earned our money; we were getting 21 dollars a month. But a lot of people actually went out of their head; they lost all control of their emotions Of course they were wounded and hurt, too, and they were sick, a lot of them.

They finally routed us out, chased us all the way down to Marvales. Finally we got the word that we were on our own. We were to make our way the best we could, individually or together, to Corregidor. The road was full of buses and tanks and trucks and wrecked cars and . . . jammed up, so we ducked down through the jungle and we were able to catch an army engineer boat... to Corregidor. Then we were assigned to a twelve-inch mortar battery. We'd never had any gunnery or training on those mortar batteries, so with just a few hours training, our first mission was a 48-round salvo. We had four guns and we salvoed twelve times . . . big projectiles to stop the Japs from advancing down Bataan. But when we got on Corregidor we were targets for the Japanese planes and artillery. Their canton was only about four and a half miles from Corregidor. There . . . [were] fantastic numbers of artillery shells that those people fired daily to try to get us out of there. It was a regular nightmare. My brother was hit on the fifth of April. . . . with a bomb and was injured quite badly. He was in the hospital and. . . . bandaged ... up pretty good. He got home OK. He got through.

We got word that Corregidor would surrender at 12 o'clock. The Japanese marched us down to bottomside (on Corregidor there are three levels: the topside, middleside, and bottomside). Bottomside was the docks and the Melinda Tunnel. In the tunnel they had a hospital, . . . ammunition and food and storage. The navy had ... a gasoline storage tunnel and people worried about that blowing up. But they marched us down and put us in a big area and we really thought that they were going to shoot us. They had machine guns set up. . . . But we didn't realize we were waiting for General Wainwright to come out. When the general came out, I was the one that called attention and gave the man a hand salute and everybody else saluted. We almost got our heads knocked off for that because his head was down and he was crying and when I called attention and gave him a salute, he popped his head up and walked down there. He was pretty well, but he was a beaten man.

I really didn't understand the consequences. Had the Japanese elected to, right there they could have done something to me, but they didn't. Then they herded us into a barbed wire . . . [enclosure]. Some . . . who had tattoos, the Japanese figured . . . were gangsters from Chicago. They said, "Chicago, NewYork, gangster." . ..

We had to bury the Japs that we'd killed coming in on Corregidor and [they] were underwater, lying on the beaches, thousands of them We had to pile them up, and by this time the sun and the weather had made things rather undesirable They took part of the man's body and cremated it They had a ceremonial platform built and the arm had to be amputated and burned and they put the ashes in boxes and little bags; then they burned the rest of them Our troops, our American troops, were thrown down a gully and gasoline was put on them and they were cremated, but there was nothing saved. I saw a lot of grown men crying, and . . . crying when the Japanese pulled our flag down and stomped on it and spit on it and urinated on it, and we stood and cried. After we had endured all the hardship, we still loved our country.

A lot of people got real sick. . . . People raided the warehouses and . .. the mess halls. They would break open five-gallon cans and make fritters—a fritter is a gob of dough . . . [fried] . . . like a doughnut. . . . That fried food was very greasy and it made them vomit and gave them diarrhea. . . . Some figured that they were fortunate to find a lot of sugar and they made goopy sweet dishes and this bothered them too. Somebody must have sold the army a million cans of Vienna sausage because that is all anybody could find. They were eating Vienna sausage, fruit out of the can, all kinds of grease stuff, anything they could get their hands on, and this caused problems.

A few days later they . . . loaded us onJapanese boats and took us out to the big ships. They took us then into Manila and about a half a mile offshore . . . they made us get out and make our way in to land. Though the water wasn't too deep, a lot of the guys had a barracks bag loaded with contraband or food. Sick for a week [and] with a heavy load on their back, a lot of them drowned. . ..

Then we were put into Billabid prison. . . . the [Philippine] government prison they used to put the federal prisoners in, political and otherwise, in Manila. . . .Then they. . . . took people in groups of five hundred or better from there and put them into bigger camps. I went up to [Camp] O'Donnell first . . . [where there were] six to seven hundred Americans dying a day from malnutrition, starvation, sickness, all kinds of things Then I was transferred down to Camp One, and the death rate stopped or lowered considerably, but in this prison camp we had a lot of people with diarrhea and dysentery, malaria In the hospital they had a ward called the Zero ward. When you were so sick that theJap doctor figured you were going to die, you went into the Zero ward People were actually bleeding from every mucus-forming membrane, and in that blood . . . maggots They couldn't eat and they lay in their defecation and blood and mucus on a mat. I was assigned to the burial detail that had to go in there and get those people We put eighty in a grave, about twenty-eight inches deep with about twelve inches of water. We put live American prisoners in their graves forced byJapanese bayonets You had to push them down with a pole to make them stay and you dumped bodies on top of bodies and covered them up with dirt, and that's the God's truth.

The second of November I left Camp One on a detail .. . to Osaka, Japan. We were put on a ship and we were something like sixty-two days from the Philippines toJapan. We were chased all over the Pacific with American bombers or torpedoes. We went into Formosa where ... no Caucasians had been for . . . many, many years. We were the first ones in there, our shipload, and we saw Formosans and it was very, very beautiful. We only stayed there a little while. . . .Then we went... to Korea and . . .were dropped off at Seoul and . . . marched through Seoul up to Chosen Reservoir area and all the way through the Koreans were spitting at us and throwing rocks and hitting us with sticks. ... A detail there . . .was digging a tunnel by the freedom bridge and there are graveyards up on top of that tunnel today.

Finally we got to Osaka. ... on Thanksgiving Day in 1942. The people were still sick. I carried a chief petty officer . . . almost two miles to get him down to this camp because he was so sick. . . . We were worked from daylight till dark in ... an Osaka steel mill. . . .We had aJap with a bayonet on us all the time. A lot of us worked rolling . . . armor plating twelve hours a day. They gave us rice and soup for breakfast, rice and soup for lunch, and rice and soup for dinner, and they might, if you behaved yourself, give you a rice ball during the day. If you worked hard and . . . were on a hardworking detail, they issued you ten cigarettes a month and . . . paid you ten cents. . . . Food was sparse, and we were fed sweet potato vines, dried onion soup, fish heads ... it was a candidate for a garbage can, but we ate it and were damn glad to get it. We all suffered from malnutrition. . . .we got big . . . splotches on our skin and our mouth and tongue. But then finally somebody discovered that if you ate the orange peelings . . . [and] the stuff you make bread with, yeast. . . [you] . . .were able to get rid of it. So you'd see us all out there picking up orange peelings from the ground. . ..

I was inJapan almost three years We were forty-two months prisoners . . . Eighty-nine days prior to the end of the war. ... we were moved ... to Oyama, and there we were stevedores on the ships as they came in There is where the American planes first appeared to us. They would come in and shoot those rockets and bomb those boats and blow the hell out of everything and we'd just stand there and cheer. The Japs would hit us on the head...

We, myself and Alvey Smith, jumped over a fence and made our way to Tokyo When I went into the railroad depot in Oyama I told them that I was there as an inspector for General MacArthur We'd heard by rumor that MacArthur was in Tokyo, but we didn't know A [guard] actually gave me his pistol and a box of food and a bottle of Sake, and showed me what train to ride on. We rode . . . with a company of Japanese soldiers with weapons, and a company commander who had moved all his troops back two seats and made sure that these American victors from MacArthur's headquarters were safe. I lied to them through my teeth and took advantage of them everywhere I turned. We got to Tokyo finally and went into the headquarters. We had jumped the fence the sixth of September. We were greeted by American officers and we were talked to and we had to take an oath that we wouldn't reveal certain things. Life magazine tried to interview us, but they couldn't do that. They fed us breakfast and sent us on down to Yokohama. The nurses deloused us, took all our clothes; we bathed and were given some new clothes. Then we were sent out to Kimpo airfield and from there .. . to Okinawa. From Okinawa we were flown to the Philippines and I was checked into the 313th General Hospital. I had a lot of dental work done . . . and I had malaria. . . . They fattened me up. .. . In the meantime my brother had flown back to the States. I followed on a vessel. . . . The thing that kind of got to me, we went up into Canada—we had some Canadian prisoners—and when we got to Vancouver every whistle and bell and every siren blew and the people were screaming and waving and everything. We ended up going into Seattle, and there was an old lady on a fork lift and that was all that was there for that ship full of American prisoners. It was like sneaking us in and . . . nobody along the street that even turned their head and looked at us. I wondered what the hell I'd gone through.

I was in the hospital for several weeks at Fort Lewis They had a recruiting officer come in to talk to the troops to see if anybody wanted to reenlist listened to him for a while, he was a first lieutenant There was a big room full of people I [had] about three rows of ribbons on and rows of stripes on my sleeves and overseas bars and all and I stood up and I said, "Lieutenant, is there any way we can get you to quit talking about it and give me the papers so I can sign up?" Everybody just gasped They didn't believe that after all that service I was ready to go again I had about twenty guys follow me At that time I made up my mind there was no better way that I could serve my country than to prevent what we'd gone through and to actually get in there with both feet and do it again.

NOTES

This interview was part of a joint oral history project conducted by the Utah State Historical Society, Weber State University, and California State University, Fullerton It is part of collection B-195 in the USHS library, Salt Lake City.