FILIPINO SCOUTS MET JAPANESE INVASION

A STUNNING ANNOUNCEMENT
On Dec. 8, 1941, Cpl. Arzaga was singing along with the radio while mopping the day-room at Fort Stotsenburg in northern Luzon.

“The announcer interrupted the program and said ‘Silence! Silence! War has been declared!”

Arzaga’s cavalry regiment had recently completed war games and met enemy forces on the beaches of northern Luzon before fighting a delaying action while slowly retreating into the easily defended Bataan peninsula.

“The 26th Cavalry was primarily a horse cavalry regiment, although we had a few armored cars and motorcycles,” recalled Arzaga, whose unit captured and trained wild Spanish ponies in the jungles of northern Luzon.

“My horse was a big mustang named Rocker,” said Arzaga. “I’m only 5 feet 7 inches, and I could hardly buck myself up on him.”

The Filipino Scouts had been recently issued the new M-1 Garand rifle to replace their old 1903 bolt- action Springfields.

“Two months before Pearl Harbor, we received the Garand rifles,” recalled Arzaga, whose unit spent endless hours on the rifle range. “The Garand was tricky to operate. If you didn’t release the trigger just right, you would fire the whole clip.”

JAPANESE ASSAULT
On Dec. 22, 1941, 43,000 troops of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma’s 14th Airily waded ashore on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf, 120 miles north of Manila. Homma’s divisions were tested by combat in China and well-supported by planes, armor and artillery.

Homma’s invasion was opposed by the Northern Luzon Force under Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright. The pride of his command were the Filipino Scouts, who were to prove themselves fierce defenders of their homeland.

“We delayed the Japs for three days at the Bued River at Rosario,” recalled Arzaga, whose battalion suffered heavy casualties from Japanese “Betty” twin-engine bombers flying in from Formosa. “We lost 90 percent of our horses at the Bued River.

“We didn’t train our horses to withstand an air attack. When those bombs exploded, our horses would run madly for their stables.”

The Filipino Scouts retreated toward Bataan while defending every river line. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the combined U.S. and Philippine Army forces, decided to pull back all his forces on Luzon to Bataan, a 30-mile peninsula of mountains, ravines, and dense jungle that separated Manila Bay from the South China Sea. This move would leave Manila to the Japanese but the American and Filipino troops could deny them the use of its harbor from the island fortress of Corregidor.

JUNGLE WAR
“The Japanese tried to infiltrate Bataan by sending canoes up the creeks behind our lines,” explained Arzaga, whose battalion would isolate and then annihilate these pockets of Japanese resistance.

“We learned some unusual tactics from the Jan infantry,” recalled Arzaga. “They would strap a machine-gun to one soldier’s back and have him crouch over while another man pulled the trigger.”

The Japanese would also conceal themselves in cliffside caves at the water’s edge; eventually they were annihilated by fire from Navy PT boats offshore and sticks of dynamite tossed down by the Filipino Scouts from above.

“At night, we would tie C-ration cans around our perimeter to prevent Japanese infiltration,” said Arzaga. “We didn’t get much sleep since monkeys would rattle the cans half the night.”

In mid-February 1942, Homma called off the offensive. The Japanese had lost more than 7,000 dead and wounded in the fighting on Bataan. Another 12,000 were with malaria, dysentery, dengue fever and beriberi. Homma pulled his exhausted army back and asked Tokyo for reinforcements.

SICK AND HUNGRY
By late March, sickness and malnutrition were gradually paralyzing MacArthur’s army. With quinine supplies running out, malaria ravaged the Fil-American army. “The buds of the rattan vine contain a small amount of quinine,” said Arzaga, referring to the treelike vine often used in furniture.

On March 10, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to Australia to assume command of American forces that were to assemble for an eventual counteroffensive. By this time, food supplies were so low that the men in the trenches looked like walking skeletons said Arzaga. “Eventually, we slaughtered our remaining horses to provide rations for other units.

“Between bites of horse meat, they would tell us ‘Thank God for the cavalry.’ “

By the end of the march, only a fourth of the original 80,000 defenders of Bataan were combat-effective. Rations now consisted of 8 to 10 ounces of rice a day and a tiny amount of fish or canned meat.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had been reinforced with 21,000 fresh troops, 150 new artillery pieces and 60 bombers.

On April 3, Good Friday, the deadlock on Bataan finally ended. The day had special meaning for the Japanese. It was the anniversary of the death of the legendary Emperor Jimmy, ancestor of Hirohito.

“The Japanese bombers destroyed our defenses along the eastern end of the Bagac-Pilar Road,” recalled Arzaga, whose regiment defended the western terminus of this crucial road. “They loaded us into open-top Filipino buses to contain the breakthrough around Little Baguio.

“By the time we arrived, our retreating forces blocked the roads and we couldn’t reach the front line.”

The next day, Maj. Gen. Edward King Jr., who had taken command on Bataan when Wainwright replaced MacArthur on Corregidor, threw his reserve into a desperate counterattack. But the starving and outnumbered Americans were no match for the Japanese.

SURRENDER
At 11 a.m. on April 9, King sat down at a field table across from Gen. Homma’s operations officer, Col. Mootoo Nakayama. The Japanese colonel refused King’s request for a 12-hour stay to collect the wounded. When Nakayama assured King that his men would be well-treated, he unstrapped his pistol, laid it on the table and surrendered the remaining 76,000 men on Bataan.

“Our troops assembled at kilometer 192 on the east highway to surrender to the Japanese,” said Arzaga, whose regiment hid their weapons in the jungle for use in guerrilla operations in the future. “On the way to the assembly point we saw Japanese enlisted men robbing and raping Filipino civilians trying to flee Bataan.”

For Cpl. Eulalio “Eli” Arzaga, one nightmare had ended — but a far worse one was about to begin — a 60-mile ordeal that became known as the Bataan Death March.

~~~~~~~
Eulalio Arzaga was sick.

Beriberi, malaria and malnutrition had sapped his strength and caused him to lose 30 pounds.

Assembled at kilometer marker 192 on the East Highway, the captives were destined for Camp ‘O’Donnell, a Philippine army installation 80 miles to the north.

“The Japanese enlisted men began by stealing our, jewelry and watches,” said former Filipino Scout Eulalio “Eli” Arzaga of Killeen, who was captured in April 1942 after the surrender of the 76,000 defenders of the Bataan Peninsula. “The Japanese officers tried to protect us, but they weren’t always around.”

THE CAPTORS’ CRUELTY …
Cruelty was common to Japanese troops, whose superiors slapped them for the slightest mis-conduct, so they considered brutality routine. Taught to die rather than surrender, they believed that prisoners deserved to be punished as severely as they themselves would be for submitting.

“They formed us’ into four columns of 400 men each and began marching us north without giving us food or water,” recalled Arzaga who suffered from a dangerously ‘high fever. “The sun was hot and as our thirst increased, some men began breaking ranks and filing their canteens from water buffalo wallows.”
The Japanese guards leaped in to prevent the men from drinking, swinging their fists, flailing with their rifle butts, pounding the men back into line. When men, almost crazy from thirst, rushed to the filthy ponds, the guards often shot them.

“You became so thirsty that you would forget that men were being killed around you,” recalled Arzaga, who decided to join a group of men filling their canteens from a caribou wallow. “A Jap sentry came up behind me and broke my rib cage with his rifle butt. He then stole my high-heeled cavalry boots and gave me some cheap rubber thongs in return.”

At Abucay, the men were assembled in an open field to receive their first meal — a handful of steamed rice and a tiny piece of dried fish. By this time, Arzaga was so ill that his troopmates were helping him walk.

“Those who fell behind were bayoneted or shot,” said Arzaga angrily. “The men began to fight among themselves for the food that Filipino civilians would throw to us.”

Filipino villagers along the road handed water, rice and sugar to the famished men, and many suffered. Japanese soldiers caught an old peasant and his wife passing out rice, burned them alive and displayed their charred bodies on the stake to discourage similar acts of generosity.

… AND SOME KINDNESS
If any Americans had harbored racist feelings before the death march, the risks taken by the Filipinos converted them to a more tolerant viewpoint.

“Filipino kids would tie a banana leaf around a ball of rice and leave it beside the road,” said Arzaga, whose bowels would cramp every time he attempted to eat. “That ball of rice meant the difference between life or death for some men.”

Near Pampanga, Arzaga briefly glimpsed his brother, Modesto, who was carrying rice back to his own unit farther down the highway. Arzaga would eventually learn of his brother’s death from disease and malnutrition after arriving at Camp O’Donnell.

“At a Japanese truck stop outside of Lubao, a Jap driver began talking to me in our own lingo. Tagalog,” recalled Arzaga. “He had been born in Manila and he told us to jump into the back of the truck.

“He said that he would tell the checkpoints that these Filipinos were his laborers to pick up rations at San Fernando.”

Unfortunately for Arzaga, upon arriving in the town of Lubao. Japanese soldiers forced him at gunpoint to dismount the truck and join the columns of dying men along the highway.

“By the third morning, men were beginning to escape into brush,” recalled Arzaga, who was too weak to attempt a sprint into the jungle. “The Japanese couldn’t load their bolt-action rifles fast enough if a large group ran at the same time.”

ESCAPE
Arzaga planned to make his escape in the town of Guagua where the highway circled the downtown plaza that fronted a ring of demolished buildings.

“I placed myself in the middle left of the column and when we rounded the plaza corner, I darted into the basement of a bombed-out building,” Arzaga said. “To my surprise, there were Filipinos in the basement and they had plenty of bird morning, men were food and

Arzaga made his escape just in time. That same day, April 11, the Philippine 91st Division had been halted on the highway near Guagua and 400 men had been marched into the jungle.

The men were forced to dig a large pit, then their wrists were tied with telephone wire. The Filipinos were then ritually beheaded, one by one, by Japanese soldiers brandishing large Samurai swords.

Arzaga spent the night of April 11 in the basement of a bombed-out pharmacy, eating his first decent meal in months.

“The next morning, an old man invited me to come recover at his house in Santa Rita,” said Arzaga, who was nearly delirious from the ravages of malaria. “He put me on his ox cart in a load of hay and we started off.

“I told the old man that if I died to take the photo of my wife out of my wallet and go to my wife’s hometown of either Lubao or Floridablanca and tell her what happened,” Arzaga said.

When the ox cart arrived in Santa Rita, Arzaga was carried inside, where the old man showed the photo of Arzaga’s wife to his daughter.

UNEXPECTED LUCK
“The daughter burst into tears and cried, ‘That is my sister Connie’s kin,’“ Arzaga said. “They shouted that I was the man who married their relative.”

The old man and his daughter loaded Arzaga onto the ox cart, covered him with hay, and took him to the evacuation area where his wife was located.

“What a feeling, seeing my wife again! She showed me my 6-month old son who she named after me.”

A relative of Arzaga’s wife traveled to Manila and purchased some quinine on the black market. He returned and began giving Arzaga regular injections of quinine.

“The shivering stopped and I slowly regained my health,” Arzaga said.

Meanwhile, 60,000 men had jammed into Camp O’Donnell, a sprawl of bamboo huts built to hold one-sixth that number. Their daily food ration consisted of a handful of rice gruel, but even worse was the lack of water. Only two spigots served 10,000 Americans.

A PRISONER AGAIN
Two weeks after being reunited with his wife, Arzaga was arrested after being denounced by a pro-Japanese Filipino.

“I was first taken to the Japanese army station at Floridablanca but eventually wound up in Camp O’Donnell,” said Arzaga, who today is commander of the Cen-Tex Chapter of the American Ex-Prisoners of War Association. “I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to my wife.”

In July 1942, all Filipino POWs were released, and Arzaga returned to his family before joining the Filipino guerrillas.