World War II Survivor William Swickard's recollection

[fraukriegbaum]

I came across this during my research of WWII homefront in my county. Some of you might be interested in reading this from our local newspaper Tribune Star in West Terre Haute IN.

 

 

 

West Terre Haute resident, World War II vet survived the Bataan Death March

By Steve Kash

Special to the Tribune-Star

 

WEST TERRE HAUTE — Sixty-five years have passed since William Swickard survived being captured by the Japanese on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines. He managed to live through five days of forced marching in what is now known as the Bataan Death March before enduring three years-plus as a Japanese prisoner of war. Talking about his experiences can still bring tears to his eyes, but as a witness to history he feels an obligation to share what he recalls. “I wasn’t a hero,” he insists. “I was a survivor.”

 

Swickard entered the U.S. Army the year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was a feisty 18-year-old who weighed 180 pounds. He had grown up on a farm in Vigo County and wanted to see the world.

 

Until enlistment, his experience was limited to having seen the Wabash Valley, where he had attended Concannon High School and then worked with the Civilian Conservation Corp, a Depression Era works project administered by the federal government until World War II.

 

His final CCC assignment, working at a rock quarry in Worthington, caused him to be invited to leave the corps and join the Army. Difficulty had arisen between him and his CCC commander, who ordered Swickard to weed the garden of his home on a Saturday afternoon. Upset, Swickard doused his boss with water that he shot from a garden hose while the man napped in his bedroom.

 

“The next week I went down to the Army recruiting station on Cherry Street in Terre Haute with my friend Scotty Brownfield,” said Swickard. “The recruiter promised us a great adventure. The war hadn’t started yet, and the Army needed volunteers. You could choose where you wanted to serve. I decided on the Philippines because it was thousands of miles away across the ocean. Wall pictures of the Philippines in the recruiting station were beautiful, and the Army’s $35 a month pay sounded good to me.”

 

After joining the Army, Swickard did military training at Fort Benjamin Harrison, north of Indianapolis. From there, with seven other Hoosier boys he met in camp, he went to the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. He served in the 60th Coast Anti-Aircraft. His duty was stereoscopic height finder (manning an instrument that helped read the altitude of planes for anti-aircraft gunners.)

 

“Just like the recruiter promised, the Philippines had golden sand beaches and blue water,” said Swickard. “We just didn’t get much of a chance to appreciate it with only one pass a month to town.

 

“At the time none of us were much concerned about a war even though there were rumors about one coming. Thousands of us G.I.’s were there. We believed that being on Corregidor, with its powerful eight-inch howitzers and almost any other kind of gun imaginable, we could defend Manila Bay against any trouble the Japanese might give us. Even after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded the Philippines, we felt we were safe.

 

“After they landed in the Philippines and took Luzon and Subic Bay, their army drove into Manila by land instead of sea. From Manila, the attack came down along the Bataan peninsula’s coast, which was only a 20-minute boat ride from Corregidor.

 

“I had gotten bored sitting around on Corregidor because there was no action. I knew how to do repair work on machine guns, so I and about a dozen others volunteered to go across the bay to Bataan. After I got there, for 30 days nothing much happened near my position.

 

“When the Japanese mounted their attack on us, I had no idea how tough they were going to be. Most of them were the size of young American kids. At first, we pushed them back, and there was no more action for several days. Then they came at us again, and they came to win. This time the soldiers were even bigger — Manchurian Japs. And they were tough. I was on the line fighting them for days. The battle was vicious and without quarter on both sides — war makes men on all sides do things they would never do as civilians. Eventually they drove us back to the edge of the sea. We had no water or ammo, and there was no way out.

 

“I don’t think the Japs had expected so many of us would surrender. They were half-starving and sick themselves on the poisoned food the Filipinos had given them, and they didn’t have enough provisions for their own men let alone all of us prisoners.”

 

The Death March began after a force of 72,000 Filipino and American soldiers surrendered on April 9, 1942, to 54,000 men under the command of Lt. General Masaharu Homma. Although the leader of the American and Filipino forces at Bataan, General King, had been promised good treatment for his men, nearly all of his soldiers were forced to take a six-day, 90-mile forced march in sweltering tropical heat to a distant Philippine railroad station. By most estimates, between 10,000 and 18,000 men died during the ordeal.

 

“We marched side by side in rows of four or five throughout the daylight hours,” Swickard recalls. “Our hands were cuffed with barbed wire, rope, or tough cogan grass, which is how they tied me up because they’d run out of wire and rope. You weren’t allowed to stop for any reason or you’d be killed. If the person next to you fell to the ground and you tried to help, you’d be killed. You couldn’t talk back or complain. If you did, you’d be killed either by getting a saber ran through you or shot or maybe beheaded. You bowed and did what they said to do. During the march some Japanese seemed to kill prisoners for the pleasure of it. Once in a great while a truck drove by with some rice for us to eat, but they never gave us any water. I saw a Filipino with a truck attempt to give us some water. Japanese soldiers killed him on the spot.

 

“After five days marching, I knew I was on the edge of dying, and so did the men in my line. We had nothing to lose, so we decided to try to escape even though if we were seen it would mean instant death. We managed to get into a stand of bamboo rushes, and after we freed ourselves of our cogan grass bindings, we made our way down a hill to the coast. We found a small docked boat with a Filipino in it. We told him to take us to Corregidor; he said the Japs would kill him if they caught him with us on his boat. We told him we would kill him if he didn’t take us.”

 

Back on Corregidor, Swickard had less than a month to get his strength back until the Japanese mounted their attack on the American island fortress.

 

“There was no escape from the island because the Japs were all around us and had control of the sea and the air,” Swickard recalls. “They shelled us on Corregidor for a month. Then one night after midnight, over on the south end of the Bataan peninsula, floodlights were turned on. We knew this meant they were coming. The squad I was in took our anti-aircraft guns down onto the sand to fire at their boats. We fought hard and took as many of them out as possible but lost again. General Wainright surrendered us when there was no hope of holding out.”

 

“I was more afraid after being captured the second time than I had been on Bataan. The Japanese had never taken my name, rank and serial number at Bataan, so they wouldn’t know I had escaped, but I’d seen firsthand what it was like being their prisoner.

 

“During the first days we were captives on Corregidor, it was terrible. The first thing they did was to take us to the edge of a high cliff where we had dumped garbage. Thousands of us were there, and they tied our hands behind our backs and for six hours made us sit up on our knees on the hard rock. Japs who could speak English insulted us and told us we were going to die. Sometimes one of their soldiers with a gun would stand behind a G.I. and act like he was getting ready to fire. I think they wanted to see how many of us would jump over the cliff, which would mean certain death, but I don’t remember anybody jumping. After six hours of this, they let us lay down and sleep some.

 

“The next day we were led to an area we called ‘Bottomside,’ which was a large concrete staging area by the sea. There, they gave us a little rice with fish in it. For days, thousands of us had to camp on the concrete without any shelter or restroom facilities. It rained hard every couple of days and that cleaned our messes off the concrete.

 

“I was lucky I grew up on a farm because I ate everything they gave me: rice and fish heads or fish eyes. The guys who couldn’t stand the food died. Our army had stored a lot of provisions and supplies in caves on Corregidor before the attack. The Japs let me and some others help clean out the caves. During this time, I encountered some kindness. The older guards were often a lot mellower toward us than younger soldiers. I don’t think they believed all the propaganda they’d heard, things like ‘Americans eat Japanese babies.’ A few times I came across caves that had stores of tin cans with fruit in them. The Japs let us eat the fruit and a few even opened the cans for us by poking the tops with their bayonets. They didn’t eat the fruit themselves because it wasn’t part of their diet. The fruit gave me diarrhea, but it was worth it because it really tasted good.”

 

Swickard would then enter into a phase of his captivity as a prisoner-of-war at a camp called Cabanatuan, north of Manila. He was confined there for almost two years.

 

“We had some freedom at Cabanatuan,” Swickard said. “We were given control of the inside of our compound and the Japs controlled the outside. We must have had about 30,000 men in there in the beginning, and there was actually medical care. The Japanese doctors used us as guinea pigs some, but I did get a few cavities fixed while I was at Cabanatuan — it was done by a hand drill and no pain killer. The fillings were good and they lasted me for years. American doctors helped the Japanese doctors by performing simple operations and giving us quinine for malaria.

 

“At Cabanatuan, we were put into squads of 10. Each man in a squad wore an identically colored ribbon. If a member of a squad escaped, the other nine squad members would be killed.

 

“There were three barracks areas. One was a stockade for men on work details. Another was for somewhat sick men who could work half a day. There were two ‘Zero’ wards. That’s where men were put to die who were no longer able to work. I worked for a while burying men who had been in Zero Ward. I made about 10 burials a day.

 

“Being a farm boy helped save my life. I was able to work on a 30-acre garden where we could grow onions, potatoes and other vegetables for the prison camp. Vegetables helped supplement our diet of fish heads and rice. Once in a while I even got to go with the Japs and help round up cattle. Sometimes they’d let me drink milk from them.

 

“Then I made a terrible mistake. The camp commander asked for volunteers to go to Japan. We didn’t have to go, but volunteers were promised more food and better treatment if we agreed to go, so I said I would.

 

“About 3,000 of us were put shoulder to shoulder in the holds of boats. There was no place to sit or lie, and there were no restrooms. The boats stayed in port for a week because of bombings over the ocean, and they didn’t let us out of the holds. We had to stand all the time. A couple of times daily, rice was hurled down through the hatch or they dumped soup on us. You could eat what you caught or fell in your mouth. Every day the Japs hauled out the dead. By the time our boat arrived on Kyushu — the main island of Japan — maybe a third of our men had died in the holds.

 

“In Japan, I was kept somewhere near the coast, but instead of working outside in fresh air on a farm, I was a made at first into a steel mill worker. We were marched from our barracks to the mill before sunlight and returned after dark. Crowds of people on the street sometimes threw rocks and bricks at us POWs. The work in the steel mill was hot and hard, and until the months right before the end of the war there were fewer gestures of kindness by our captors than I had experienced in the Philippines.

 

“Thousands of us Americans did this work for long hours six days a week. I worked with a team of 35 or 40 Americans near hot vats. Our job was to clean up the overflow of hot steel that came cherry red over the top of the vat. Cold water was poured on it until the molten steel took on the consistency of coal. Then we had to chop it out. Our footwear was thin rubber slippers.

 

“I’d learned some Japanese and could understand what they were saying. You had to know it to count off your number in Japanese in a prison lineup. On the job, if a boss asked you to get a bucket, and you didn’t know what bucket was in Japanese, you might get hammered over the head with a bucket by a guard — then you’d know what a bucket was if you were still alive.

 

“The guards were under orders not to show us any mercy, though sometimes Japanese school girls who came into the factory to earn money selling food to Japanese workers at lunchtime gave us a little sandwich to eat.

 

“The main person over us in the mill was a little one-eyed guy with a pearl-handled gun. He had lost his eye because of Americans and he hated us. For no reason at all he might start beating you and you had to stand there and take it. You couldn’t even cuss under your breath because some of them knew American swear words, and if you said one of them in anger at them, you’d get killed.”

 

One time Swickard was threatened with execution. He was told to kneel down in front of a grave he had to dig for himself. A gun was placed at the back of his head, but at the last minute the commanding officer spared his life.

 

“You just had to keep going or else,” Swickard said. “The most important thing that kept me going was I could force myself to eat all the fish heads and rice I could get. They also gave us a ration of 10 Philippine Dobby cigarettes a month — they were pretty good.

 

“Once I got caught sneaking some mongo beans into the steel mill’s barracks to supplement my diet. Earlier in my captivity this would have meant death, but they let me off with just a week of solitary confinement stripped naked and put in a little cage.”

 

Swickard’s last job for the Japanese was working in a coal mine near the steel mill. He loaded and unloaded coal cars. Being outside, he could see an increasing number of planes coming to bomb targets in Japan.

 

“We had an idea the war was winding down because toward the end of it the Japs were easier on us and even fed us better. One morning at around eight nobody came for us at our barracks and somebody told us to stay there for two hours. Then we were all called into an open area where a pile of rifles was stacked in front of us.

 

“A general stood on a platform. He told us that the war was over and Japan had surrendered. He apologized for any mistreatment. After that, the Japs were nice to us. We stayed on in the barracks because it would be another six weeks before American soldiers arrived. Most Japanese soldiers left but a few hung around the prison camp. I guess they didn’t know where else to go. The little man with one eye and the pearl-handled pistol left and we never saw him again. He was smart to get out of there so nobody could find him.

 

“Soon American bombers were flying over our area with food drops. By this time I was down to about 110 pounds, but I started gaining weight back pretty quickly. Unfortunately, a few of our men ate so much right after the air drops that they got sick and died because their bodies weren’t ready for the richer food, which included chocolate bars.

 

“I got one war trophy. In the weeks after the war, before the American Army came for us, a few buddies and I were out walking around. We happened to go to a train station, and we saw on the platform a Japanese soldier carrying a battle sword that was beautiful and had jewels on it. My sergeant asked me if I wanted the sword, and I said that I did. Somehow the sergeant had gotten hold of a Lugar pistol. Our group of men went up to the fellow with the sword; the sergeant pointed the gun at him and told him to give me the sword. He didn’t want to but considering the circumstances, he did. I brought the sword home with me, which meant I had to carry it all the way down through the Philippines. After I finally got settled and had my own home, I displayed the sword until a fire burned my place down.”

 

In the year after World War II, on April 9, 1946, Japan’s commander in charge of the Bataan Death March, General Homma, was executed for war crimes outside of Manila.

 

Swickard by this time had returned to West Terre Haute, where he was beginning a career in auto mechanics. For 27 years, he had a productive career as a mechanic at the former Froderman Chevrolet in Terre Haute. He has been married to his wife, Margaret, for more than 55 years. They raised eight children, four were his natural children and four were hers by a previous marriage.

 

“My wife and I’ve had a good life together,” says Swickard. “With all of us, our family’s been a little like the Brady Bunch.”

 

Swickard says that he still has nightmares of his World War II experiences, but with the passage of time they have lessened.

 

Scotty Brownfiled and Bill Swickard (right photo)

[STALAGLUFT1]

That's great that he still has his memory. A Bataan Death March survivor lives less than a mile from my house but doesn't remember much due to Alzheimer's, a real shame. Thanks for sharing this.

Regards,

Brian

[Jim Baker]

Great story. Thanks!!

 

I used to live in Terre Haute, graduated from South.

[disneydave]

Thanks for sharing that. What an amazing story.

[fraukriegbaum]

Great story. Thanks!!

 

I used to live in Terre Haute, graduated from South.

 

 

Hello former Terre Hautean....

 

There's a lot for me to catch up with the Vets here....i just learned very recently that there's a lot of them here...

There is also some Vet Medics from all over US that meet here in Terre Haute yearly the weekend before the 4th of July. I missed it last year....hope to catch up with them this year.