Bataan

The day before the Mt. Princeton climb, we got lost while on a nine-mile hike that ended up being around 13 miles long before we were picked up and brought back to the lodge, some people with blisters and all of us more exhausted than we wanted to be before the big day. At one point someone (it could have been I) referred to it as a Bataan death march. Well, obviously it doesn’t come close; I was eager to go to the memorial in Bataan and see what there was to see.

First of all, the pronunciation – “a” as in adios, each “a” pronounced, so Bata-an. It’s the peninsula at the north end of Manila Bay – but there are no longer ferries, so Bill and I took a bus ride to get to the provincial capital, Balanga (it took about three hours each way). There we met Kate and her friend Romeo, who had a car. We went to a local place for brunch (tapsilog for me) and then on to Mt. Samat, site of fierce fighting and of the memorial. Kate had visited during her PST, and she is COSing in a few weeks, so for her it was a bookend to her experience.

Romeo kept asking me if we wanted to walk (it would have been 7K if we’d taken a jeepney from town – I didn’t know until that morning that we’d have a ride) and I said I felt that we couldn’t commemorate a 100K march by driving all the way to the top, but that since he kept asking I could tell he didn’t want to! He and Kate let us out at the 5K marker and we started up. Bill had done the Taal volcano just last week with Julie and he said this was steeper. And it was really humid. While we were walking, I hummed the theme from “Patton” to myself – wrong theatre of the war, but great music.

Somewhere between the 3K and 2K markers, we encountered Kate and Romeo – they had found a path down from the top. So we left the blacktop and went up an even steeper (but more fun) shortcut through the jungle. At the top is a big cross (same height as the Statue of Liberty, which, I learned, is 46 meters of base and then 46 meters of statue – this was all 92), the bottom of which is sculpted with bas-reliefs of battle scenes. I’m told that on a clear day you can see the cross from Manila, and that it lines up exactly with the Rizal Monument.

We took an elevator to the horizontal part of the cross, where we could see mountains in the distance in both directions (behind the southern one is Corregidor), Manila Bay on one side and the South China Sea on the other, hills and trees all around (replanted with help from the Japanese), farms, towns. We then went down to a second memorial that had the story of the battle, stained glass, plaques for each division that fought there, and a museum with black-and-white photographs, guns and uniforms.

The story of the Death March is pretty gruesome, so if you want lots of details, look for them elsewhere, but the short version is that after Bataan fell, the men who surrendered were marched 100K over the course of five days and then herded onto trains to go to POW camps. Malnourished to begin with and given no provisions, anyone who fell out of line was killed and many others just couldn’t make it – maybe 20,000 of the 75,000 who started perished. Even more died in the camps. Each year on April 9th, thousands go to Mt. Samat on the anniversary (I can’t imagine where they all fit). Bataan was one of the places I most wanted to visit when I knew I was coming here, and I felt awed to be there. I should also note that while I looked this up to confirm my numbers I learned (or re-learned) that the bridge where State Street crosses the Chicago River is called the Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge; I shall plan to go there when next in town!