March 17, 1942: Bataan Death March

[Warph]

IN PERSON: Death march survivor describes life after a grim war crime

By TOM PFINGSTEN For the North County Times North County Times 
Posted: Saturday, March 17, 2012 8:00 am
Read more: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/columnists/inperson/in-person-death-march-survivor-describes-life-after-a-grim/article_a70f9d39-adb5-5e3d-84ab-0fcbe4b75e2d.html#ixzz1pOURHoC4


CARLSBAD ---- Seventy years ago today, Lester Tenney was under siege with 70,000 other troops, bottled up at the tip of a tropical peninsula called Bataan.

It was the hot season in the Philippines ---- when temperatures hit triple digits, thick with humidity ---- and sometime during the grueling battle for Bataan, the mosquitoes had infected him with malaria, a fever-inducing ailment that amplified the punishing heat.

Like the rest of the Americans and Filipinos in the trenches and bivouacs in March 1942, he did not know that he was about to be sent on one of the most treacherous forced marches of the 20th century ---- a deadly, 80-mile walk north, to a prison camp.

This week, I sat down with Tenney at his home in Carlsbad as he told me about his service in World War II ---- from the anxiety as he watched the Japanese begin their assault on the Philippines hours after attacking Pearl Harbor, to his three years of hard labor in a Japanese coal mine.

Having joined the Army to fight, Tenney spent all but four months of the war as a prisoner, and his experience as a POW is still a powerful and emotional story, 70 years after the death march.

He is 92 years old, but he has the memory of a much younger man ---- perhaps because he has been giving talks about World War II on a weekly basis for years.

"My life has always been very positive," he told me. "My time in the death march, I was a positive person. My time in prison camp was as a positive person. When I came out, I was a positive person. Being positive just stays with you."

I asked him how he could say he was positive during the death march, commonly regarded as one of the most dehumanizing war crimes in modern history.

"Positive to the point that I just knew I was going to survive," Tenney answered.

And that was despite the many horrors suffered along the Philippine national highway, where all 70,000 prisoners were prodded along and abused. It is unknown precisely how many died on the march, but the number is in the thousands.

On Wednesday, Tenney recalled being locked in large rice warehouses along the route during the night to prevent escape.

"They would push us in there until they could get no more in, and seal it until the following morning," he said. "I remember (after) that first night, there must have been 80 that were standing there, dead. They just couldn't move. They died in there, and the ones that were alive came out and started the march again.

"The third day of the march, a Japanese slit me down the back with a samurai sword," Tenney continued. "He was riding on horseback, going like that to all the men. Hit me here. They brought a medic and sewed me up ---- it hurt like hell and I ran a fever, but my attitude was the same: 'I'm going to make it.'"

That willpower, that mental toughness, was the key. It was the reason Tenney went on to become a husband, a father and a professor of economics at Arizona State University, and why he could sit down for an interview this week to observe the 70th anniversary of the death march.

"I made the decision to come home, and then it was just a matter of doing everything I had to do to reach that goal," he said. "That's why, when I was working in the coal mines, I broke a leg, I broke a foot, I broke my own hand to stay out of work ---- because I felt that I just couldn't make it another day. So I'd break an arm, break a hand, break a foot ---- break something.

"We made our own ulcers just to stay out of work for another day or two, that was all. You just reached the point where you said, 'If I go down tomorrow, I'm not coming up.'"

Reports vary as to how many death march survivors remain in the U.S., but by all accounts, the number stands at just a few dozen.

Considering the malaria, dysentery, malnourishment, abuse and post-traumatic stress those men endured, I think it's incredible that any of them are still alive.

I asked Tenney, "Did you ever think you were going to ..."

"Die?" he said, finishing my question. "Yeah, a number of times."

"Did you think you'd live to see 92?" I asked.

"I didn't think I'd live to see 40."

Tenney acknowledges that others had it easier. Not everyone who was captured in Bataan had to endure a ride in the "hell ships" to work camps in Japan; not all of them remained prisoners for as long as he did.

But he doesn't think of them when he assesses his time in the war. He thinks of the ones who didn't make it.

"I had the luck of the draw," he said, astoundingly. "Yeah, I came home."

Read more: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/columnists/inperson/in-person-death-march-survivor-describes-life-after-a-grim/article_a70f9d39-adb5-5e3d-84ab-0fcbe4b75e2d.html#ixzz1pOSiok00