If ever there was such a place as hell on earth, then it must have been located on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines during World War II.
For Henry King, it was a place where the air was thick with the stench of death — a place where survival was the main objective.
King, a native Texan, says he doesn’t mind talking about the horrors he faced. Still, his eyes scarcely moved from their fixed gaze that burned an imaginary hole in his kitchen table throughout a 45-minute interview.
Choosing his words carefully, King recounted his four years as a prisoner of war (POW), starting in the Philippines and ending in Japan, just a few miles away from the atomic bomb blast that leveled Nagasaki, sending the empire into the hands of defeat and a 6-foot one-inch, 85-pound farm boy back to Texas.
King volunteered for military service in June of 1941 — nearly six months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“I knew I was going to be drafted soon anyway,” King admitted. “I had some friends that were going to go in with me. I was sure we were headed for war. There wasn’t any getting around it from my perspective.”
A member of the Army Air Corps, King was shipped off from California after basic training at March Field in Riverside. By October 23, he was in the Philippines.
“It was a strange place, especially if you had never been out of the country before,” King said of the string of islands in the South Pacific. “It was a backwards country. It was like stepping back in time.”
Eight days into December, the news broke about the assault on Pearl Harbor.
“It was the morning that Hawaii was hit,” King recalled. “We listened to the radio and heard about it. We didn’t know how much damage had been done, but we felt safe because we thought, ‘We’re on a little island out here. Japan wouldn’t even want to fool with us.’ We felt that if they were going to hit us, they would hit us later.”
The talk around the base was relaxed. Soldiers couldn’t see how “little ol’ Japan” could take on the mighty forces of the United States with any measure of success.
At 1 p.m. that same day, they would find out just how wrong they were.
“That’s when we heard the planes,” King said, shaking his head. “We looked up and saw them and said, ‘Our planes must be getting some sort of assistance already, because that is not our color. Those must be Navy planes.’”
Perhaps the soldiers were just trying to humor themselves, but the Philippine troops were no better prepared than Pearl Harbor had been just a few hours earlier, despite radio warnings of the massive devastation in Hawaii.
They were not Navy planes. All doubt was erased when the bombs began to pummel the surrounding earth. Pandemonium broke loos as people were running everywhere looking for cover.
“It was enough to scare the hell out of you,” King noted.
The battle raged on for months. By Christmas Eve, Gen. Douglas MacArthur threw down the gauntlet, ordering American forces to withdraw to Bataan. It was there where supplies would be stockpiled for a last stand. It would also prove a tactical blunder on MacArthur’s part.
Jungle, swamp and mountains made the peninsula difficult to penetrate but also hard to supply, and shortages of food and medicine plagued the Bataan Defensive Force throughout the siege.
Directed by Gen. Masahura Homma, fierce Japanese assaults beginning in January assured 1942 would be even worse than her predecessor.
By March, it appeared American defenses were holding the line and MacArthur was ordered home, replaced by Gen. Jonathan Wainwright. But a lack of rations weakened the 100,000 defenders who remained.
MacArthur said the troops could hold out until May, despite Wainwright’s protest. Wainwright predicted starvation for the troops, yet that would come later at the hands of the Japanese.
Restocked with fresh troops, the Japanese began a renewed assault in early April. Within a week, the American/Filipino forces surrendered.
“We had positioned ourselves across the top of a mountain,” King remembered. “I will never forget the scene. We were looking down into this valley. There were so many Japanese that the trees looked like they were moving. They got so close that our lines broke. We tried to establish another line further back.”
The next day, the American boys were told of the surrender by Major General Edward Postall King, Jr.
“A jeep drove up with Gen. King in it,” he continued.
“He got out and said, ‘I have made surrender terms for you. We have done everything we can do. We have run out of ammunition, run out of food and our only chance is to try to get as good a deal as we can from the Japanese. I have made terms with the stipulation that the Japanese will take care of you. Feed you. Clothe you.
“He then said ‘The only thing you can do now is take your rifles and stack them in a pile out there. Make white flags. The Japanese will be here in an hour or two to give you instructions. I have done the best I can do. In fact, I have gone against my superiors’ orders. My orders were to fight to the last man. I can’t believe that is the right thing to do.’”
Hungry and exhausted, soldiers were hopeful of food and rest. They would get neither.
“We didn’t know what they were going to do,” King recounted. “After considerable searching to make sure we didn’t have any guns, they lined us up into groups of four and we started marching.”
That is how one of the most infamous chapters in history — the Bataan Death March — began.
“We marched the rest of that day, way into the middle of the night,” King said. “When the sun came up, we started marching again.”
Eventually, King said the POWs were taken to a three-sided building “to rest.”
“There were so many people that you couldn’t even turn around ,” he lamented.
So weary were some, they just laid one on top of another.
Food rations were no better than the accommodations. Five gallons of rice per 100 men. Each man would receive a cup of rice per day. Over three nights and four days, they would be forced to march 70 miles.
As far as King’s eyes could see in either direction stood a wall of walking flesh. It would test each and every man’s sanity. Compounding the physical pain was the mental anguish of watching their Japanese keepers drag one soldier after another into the fields to certain death. Other times, the carnage was carried out in full view of passing soldiers. The sounds of blood-curdling screams could be heard throughout the demoralized prisoners as the uncooperative and feeble were bayoneted through the chest.
“I almost got it myself,” King admitted. “There was very little water. We passed by a natural well where fresh water was flowing freely and I thought I would make a quick dash out there and get a drink. One of the guards came through screaming with his bayonet ready to see which one it was, but I had gotten back in time and he didn’t know which one of us had done it.”
There was nothing the soldiers could do for one another.
“Survival was the main thing,” King said, his eyes still glazed. “If there was something you could do, you would, but not if it placed your own life in jeopardy.”
When the marching was over, an estimated 22,000 men were dead — 5,000 Americans. But the nightmare had only just begun. Next came the POW camps, where another 25,000 men would parish.
King was initially taken to Camp O’Donnell. There he would stay for the next nine months. He was weak at first, but the worst was yet to come.
“The trip had worn us down completely,” King observed. “Then after we got there, the food situation was so bad and the conditions kept getting worse. All kinds of diseases were rampant throughout the camp. Malaria began taking its toll. Dysentery. We had scurvy. Big sores would break out on us and there wasn’t any medicine.”
King would survive malaria, but other maladies persisted, taking him to the brink of death.
“Men were dying off faster than they could bury them,” King lamented. “About 75 a day were dying. But by this time, I was in such bad condition, I thought I would be next.”
When the POWs were moved to Cabanatuan, the infamous Japanese Death Camp, King’s captors thought he was a goner and left him at O’Donnell.
“That’s when this ol’ boy left this bag by me as he was being taken to Cabanatuan.”
Barely able to move, stricken with dysentery and scurvy, King managed to grasp the bag, discovered a bottle of Vick’s Vapor Rub.
“I had dysentery so bad and was so weak that I was lying in my own defecation,” his horrendous story unfolded. “I just scooped up a whole mouthful of Vick’s and swallowed it. I figured it was either going to kill me or do something.”
It did indeed do something.
“By the next morning, by golly my dysentery had let up enough so that I could crawl away from where I had been.”
King could see smoke about a quarter-of-a-mile away. He began to crawl in that direction. He was even able to walk part of the way. He stumbled to a group of men who were also in a similar condition, left behind to live…or die.
Eventually, the Japanese returned and transported the survivors to Cabanatuan.
There, he managed to find work in the kitchen, which allowed him additional food and his physical status began to improve.
Along with other POWs, a garden was started. In 1943, the Japanese deemed King healthy enough to be transported to Japan, where he would spend the rest of the war enslaved in a coal mine. He was inside the mines when the A-bomb destroyed Nagasaki. Within days, he was a free man, headed home to Bryson.
King would later go to the University of North Texas (“I went to Denton and saw all the pretty girls and said, ‘That’s what I want to do!), obtaining a degree in industrial arts.
Although nightmares would surface from his days as a POW in the years to come, King seems content to live playing the hand life dealt him.
He turned into a civilian “family soldier,” nursing his mother and two sisters whose lives were stricken with cancer. In time, he found himself alone and moved down the road to Graham.
When the dreams come, he will see himself in the camps, and will think, “What am I doing here again? My mother is sick at home and needs me. Why did I come here again?”
Pressed, King speculated “What if?”
“Sure, I have wondered what my life would have been like if this hadn’t happened to me,” King ventured. “Would I have been a different outlook on life? I don’t know. I just don’t know…”