Remembering Bataan

If you know that tomorrow the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would come to sow desolation, famine and death over the land, you would be thrown into sudden panic and turmoil. Every man, in feverish hurry, would do whatever on the spur of the moment seems to enable him and his dear ones to escape the impending peril. Were it a certainty that within twenty-four hours, our Country would be invaded by some rapacious foreign power, or maltreated by some local power, threatening to wreck your homes and destroy all that you and yours stand for, that knowledge would galvanize the entire nation into instant action, determined, strenuous and total, but perhaps futile because of unpreparedness, to repel the aggression. You wished we had more time.

The picture is not mere fantasy. Its possibility of realization is inexact only in one point: in that it will not take place tomorrow; and that we do have to pray for time for we have it; in that we may avert the catastrophe if we now organize all the resources of the nation, natural and human, all her forces, economic and intellectual, to meet the oncoming dangers. But we have to act now, and that means every Filipino citizen, man and woman. Our efforts and labor must be coordinated in accordance with a careful and comprehensive plan.

Let us take warning from the fate of nations that only in the last few months have been overtaken by horrible tragedies. Our strength lies in our people, our resources, in the building up of a solid national economy, and in an intense, all pervading love of country that should make every one of us ready to render service, to undergo any hardship or sacrifice, in order to achieve our national security and salvation. But our downfall is the greed, arrogance and spoils of public office. Madame President, isn’t there any hope left for you to change the way this government is run? Will you continue to allow this country and its people to be exploited and humiliated unprotected by the fools who strut in public office?

In this generation of epicureanism and self-indulgence, where men and women have grown soft and society has gone mad, it’s important to remember that once there was a time when the best and the brightest of Filipinos rallied to the flag, fought valiantly for a cause, endured hardship and hunger, and the frustration and humiliation of defeat, a bone-grinding Death March, and months of captivity in a hell-hole of a prison camp into which the flower of our manhood marched, and after cruel months, those who survived, skeletons of themselves, limped out again.

Bataan Day, which was ignored, should prick the conscience of both Filipinos and Americans. We have a tendency to sweep this three-month ordeal on the doomed Bataan peninsula under the rug. April 9, 1942 was the day our colors were furled in surrender and a “defeated army” began its cruel death march into captivity. Seventy-five thousand Filipinos and American soldiers captured by the Japanese forces marched from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell, the biggest prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in the Philippines, located in Capas, Tarlac. And in the jungles and foxholes of Bataan, we lost many of the best and the brightest (and surely the bravest) of an entire generation.

Let us not forget how our countrymen fought together and stood the ground during those days. They fought beyond the limits of human endurance – sick and starving, disappointed by the betrayal of American promises of a seven-mile “relief convoy,” deserted by their leader General Douglas MacArthur (who fled, on orders from Washington to organize the defense of Australia) – Filipinos fired off their last bullets, tightened their ragged belts, determined to die in the defense (not of the American flag but of their homeland).

My late father, Maximo V. Soliven once wrote, “Those who sprout rhetoric about nationalism have no idea of the true national pride the Filipinos, from leader to masa, of the Bataan generation carried in their hearts, it was bred all the way into the marrow of their bones. The American generals, in fact, were the ones who waved the white flag of surrender in Bataan — not one Filipino general or officer concurred. They wept almost to a man at being deprived of the honor of making a last stand. And when the arrogant Japanese conquerors slapped them, hit them with rifle butts, and killed so many of our boys with bayonet and bullet during that march to Tarlac under the burning April sun, forbidding them to even drink from the fetid and noxious waters of the roadside ditches under pain of death, we lost more men during that period of agony than on the battlefield. At least, clothed in its rags of glory this dying and disease stricken army still managed to hold its head high.”

I wish we could restore to the dead of Bataan, the Death March and Capas, Tarlac, at least a small measure of honor and gratitude that they deserve. It was a shining hour in which courage was the mean, and not the exception. The weary collapse of that exhausted army was no shame. The shame, for our years of churlish neglect, belongs to us.

Here is a poem my father wrote in his youth that reminds us of this day:

The man of Bataan – I shall see them as I have always seen them

A ragged processional of gaunt, grim, and ghostly men

Marching from a field that slept; No longer underneath their stars and stripes,

But under the blood-red banners of an alien conqueror that had come

Like shadows in the night, to thrust the bayonet of treachery into the side of good

I shall see them as they marched side by side, triumphant in their agony;

For freedom did not falter with their falling, but lives,

Brighter for their sacrifice, in the hearts of men.

I shall remember them… Defenders of a broken soil, grasping valiantly, hopelessly,

The sharp “kampilans” of their fathers.

I shall remember them, as my children shall remember them

A ragged army marching from a ragged battlefield

That they had held with valor and with pride until the end.

A ragged army tramping to the jeers of enemies,

A wasted troop that would not surrender a wasted field!

Let the crosses upon crosses rising rank on rank be the only monumentals

We raise unto their memory.

Someday, the spirit of Bataan may be rekindled in our hearts – but alas, it seems – not yet.