The spire of the Capas National Shrine rises 240 feet into the air above the hot, humid plains of central Luzon. There is lots of symbolism included in the site. Three parts of the towering spire represent the peoples of the Philippines, the United States and … Japan. Covering 54 hectares – 130 acres – over half of the grounds have been planted with 31,000 trees representing the 25,000 Filipinos and 6,000 Americans who perished here at Camp O’Donnell following the end of the Bataan Death March in 1942. The park was named a national shrine by President Cory Aquino in 1991 with the tower was added in 2003 with a memorial wall behind with the names of those known to have perished here at the camp.
Bataan fell at the beginning of April 1942. Like with the fall of Singapore earlier in the year, the Japanese were not ready for the vast number of prisoners falling into their hands. Not having ratified the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 – the US, UK, France, China and even Germany ratified; the USSR did not sign on to the treaty while the Japanese signed but did not ratify – Japan never adopted the conventions laid down at Geneva. They purposely mistreated prisoners throughout the war. Japanese prisoners would eventually pay the penalty for not signing when much of the million plus soldiers and civilians in Manchuria found themselves prisoners of invading Soviet Union. Many would not return to Japan for years, if lucky.
JAPANESE THOUGHTS ON SURRENDER AND PRISONERS OF WAR
Bushido is the Japanese ideal human image formed in the Edo period – era of the Tokugawa shogunate 1603 to 1867. It represented a moral code in which samurai lived their lives. How to live a life with honor and virtue within society. Bushido was not simply one philosophy but varied within the multiple samurai clans. Samurai, as a separate class within Japan, were abolished during the1870’s when the Meiji oligarchy – those supporting the restoration of Imperial power.
As part of the so-called Meiji Restoration, modernization processes rolled along while old ways – bushido and Shintoism, the main religious practice of most Japanese – saw incorporation. Both bushido and Shinto were not monolithic, but the ideas and practices varied throughout the country. The ideas became intertwined with propaganda used by the government and the military. Those ideas changed as needed in the new centralized nation. As nationalism increased late in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of bushido changed in response to foreign stimuli. Bushido became a method to maintain the national spirit, honor traditional practices in the face of a world rapidly modernizing.
evolution of bushido to fit the times
The military molded the philosophy to their purposes as they gained power within the new Japan. War offered a chance to purify and death a duty. One was indebted to the nation by their birth. That debt needed repayment through physical or mental exertion. The nation painted as a big family in which obedience required all to heed with the Emperor-God at the top – “one hundred million hearts beating as one”.
With war, the new bushido applied to all soldiers – not only those of the old samurai ranks. Surrender seen as disgraceful. Those who returned to Japan after being POWs in wars before World War 2 had a hard time spurned by general society for their actions. A fight meant to the death or live in disgrace without honor. The dead gathered up for a spot at the Yasukuni Shrine, almost 2.5 million names listed in the Symbolic Registry of Divinities
Japan did not have a history of prisoner of war mistreatment until after World War 1. The 1920’s ebbed into the 1930’s as the military gained further control over the future of the country. Bushido melded onto a nationalistic idea of Japanese superiority above all other races. Absolute loyalty to the emperor and disdain for non-Japanese. This had horrible ramifications not only in the Philippines but all-over southeast Asia and China where literally millions died.
SURRENDER AT BATAAN
9 April 1942 the USAFFE forces on Bataan surrender putting 12,000 Americans and 63,000 Filipinos into Japanese captivity. Like the situation earlier in Singapore, the Japanese were not ready for the number of prisoners they would have in custody – Bataan gave them two to three times more than they thought. They thought POWs would have rations in place to sustain them. The USAFFE forces had no rations, one of the main reasons they surrendered.
death march
Prisoners from Bataan marched up the east side of the peninsula 65 miles to a rail depot at San Fernando. This was the Bataan Death March. Corregidor still held out in Manila Bay with 12,000 men. Japanese commander General Masaharu Homma needed to bring in guns and troops in preparation for a siege of the island. There was no transportation available to move POWs and civilians out of the way. So, the POWs were forced to march over 60 miles to the rail station at San Fernando. From there, the prisoners entrained the final thirty miles to Tarlac where they marched the final miles to Camp O’Donnell set up as a holding camp for the many POWs.
Roughly 18,000 Filipinos and 500-650 Americans died on the gruesome march in which wanton killings and severe physical abuse was normal. To the normal Japanese soldier, the men of USAFFE were inferior to the Japanese. Their surrender only further heightened this impression. April marks the dry season in the Philippines greeted by hot temperatures. During the march, little food or water were provided to the POWs already suffering from malnutrition after the months-long siege. Survivors of the march stuffed themselves into metal box cars for the final three-hour rail trip to their last stop where they walked a final nine miles to their new home at Camp O’Donnell. Of the estimated 80,000 prisoners, only 50,000 made it to O’Donnell.
CAMP O’DONNELL
Before the war, Camp O’Donnell became as a center for the Commonwealth Army. With the oncoming of war, the camp became the gathering and training center for the new 71st Division. The O’Donnell name given not for some Irish American serving in the US Army, but for an early Spanish settler family – Irish served Spain against Britain – who arrived in the late 19th century.
The POW camp was overseen by Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, a 1915 graduate of the Japanese military academy. A reservist shunted into this undesirable job because more adept officers went to the fronts. An overage captain while his peers were full colonels. One superior noted he possessed “no common sense … did not handle matters well” nor had “no understanding of the prisoners”
He addressed each group of arriving prisoners for as long as two hours upon their arrival in the hot sun. A weak man, he took his frustrations out on the men in his charge. “You are cowards and should have committed suicide as any Japanese soldier would do when facing capture. I only regret that I cannot destroy you all, but the spirit of Bushido forbids such practice. It is only due to the generosity of the Japanese that you are alive. The slightest violation of orders will result in execution. I have already shot many Filipinos in the last week for disobedience of orders. You are the eternal enemies of Japan.”
death all around
Disease, malnutrition, lack of water, shelter, clothing medicine killed at a rate of over 300 a day, mostly Filipinos who the Japanese held as subhuman. Prisoners were allowed one canteen a day to wash and drink. Most suffered from dysentery, so there was no water to wash away the fecal matter from their bodies. Filipino bodies lie buried close enough to the lone miserable creek to contaminate the waters even more.
Protesting the malevolent conditions, General Edward King – US commander at Bataan who surrendered – Captain Tsuneyoshi replied, “I hate all Americans and always will hate you. The only thing I want to know is when one of you dies. I will then see that you bury each other.”
The hospital consisted of three crude buildings with wood floors and two others initially with dirt. No beds of blankets were available, let alone medicine. Prisoners nicknamed the place the “House of Horrors” and stove to avoid the place as nothing more than a place to die. Americans stayed segregated from Filipinos. As bad as conditions were in the American compound, the Filipinos had it much worse.
Death came for the young. Almost two thirds of American deaths were of men twenty-five or younger. Faced with major adversity for the first time in their lives, it was easier to give up.
SEGREGATION
In late May 1942, American prisoners transferred to the three Cabanatuan prison camps. Filipinos were to become part of a new vassal state, part of the new Co-Prosperity Sphere, as such, it was understood they would be eventually released as opposed to the Americans who were permanent captives.
The hope of bringing about a malleable and servile Philippines seriously undermined by treatment of Filipinos held at O’Donnell. The openly contemptuous and arbitrary treatment of Philippine prisoners simply undermined strategic hopes. Filipino soldiers were not considered as soldiers but as men unworthy of respect.
Filipinos ended up crammed in a space earlier meant for 10,000 instead of 60,000. Philippine Scouts became placed with the men of the Commonwealth Army meaning horrible conditions in the short run, but a chance at release if they survived.
By July 1943, the camp closed. Americans all moved out and Filipinos who survived given conditional pardons by the Japanese. All that remained by the time Americans liberated the former camp at the end of 1944 was a concrete cross memorializing American dead. The concrete supplied by the Japanese just before the American prisoners shifted to Cabanatuan. “Without providing any other directions or instructions, the Japanese supply sergeant simply stated “Now, courtesy of Imperial Japanese Army, you make shrine for men who die.”
REMEMBRANCE
The dead buried here at Camp O’Donnell eventually moved to either Manila ABMC – Americans and Philippine Scouts – or to Libingan ng mga Bayani, Heroes Cemetery, a little farther to the south of the ABMC cemetery.
Long before any memorial was built here at Capas, several memorials went up to Japanese veterans who fought and occupied the islands from 1942 to 1945 in response to Ferdinand Marcos ratification in 1973 of the Philippine-Japan treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation. It took Marcos’ successor, Corazon C. Aquino to begin the remembrance process here at Capas.
By 1991, US and Philippine relations were at a low point. In response to Philippine views of Marcos as an American puppet, lease renewals at Clark Airforce Base and Subic Bay Naval Base found rejection by the Philippine Senate.
John E. Olson, West Point Class of 1939, served in the 57th Infantry Regiment of the Philippine Scouts. He was one on the many imprisoned after 9 April when Bataan fell. He and another prisoner helped create the lone monument created to remember the many at Camp O’Donnell during and after the war. After years of effort, he was able to bring that memorial back to the US now on display at the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia.
The Capas Shrine was seen by some as an attempt to salvage remaining ties to the US by President Aquino who had opposed removal of American bases and had been saved by efforts by the US Navy in a 1989 military coup attempt.
Pinatubo then erupted massively in June 1991. This made it easier for the US to withdraw from the Philippines also putting on hold ideas of monuments at Capas.
NATIONAL SHRINE
Even as a national shrine, Capas remains in a remote location for most tourists. The shrine finds itself included in recent years as part of the New Clark City commercial zone, a new commercial and governmental city built upon parts of the former Philippine military camp which persists to the west. It is possible the shrine would not exist for not the problems existed between the Philippines and the US between the 1970 to early 1990s.
On the east side of the shrine tower and wall is a small museum dedicated to the memory of the camp. There is a sole remaining example of one of the rail box cars that carried up to 150 men on a thirty-mile three-hour trip in stifling and hideous conditions. Nearby, stand a replica of the original American cross erected here, monuments erected by two American veteran groups, the Battling Bastards of Bataan and the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. Names of the American dead inscribed on a wall.
Nearby, one finds monuments erected by the Philippine Scouts Heritage Society, local Filipino citizens trying to help the POWs and to seven Czechoslovaks who fought on behalf of the Filipinos against the Japanese.
FILIPINO FORGIVENESS?
The Japanese occupation of the Philippines was not a happy time for the archipelago. The surprise is their inclusion as one of the three spires here at Camp O’Donnell. That inclusion is not popular regardless of whether or not the Philippines needs Japanese money to invigorate their economy – they do. A nation can only go so far, however, to forgiving past deeds.
The 2016 visit by Emperor Ahkito to the cenotaph in the Japanese memorial garden at Lake Caliraya southeast of Manila memorializing the 518,000 Japanese soldiers dying in the Philippines during the war. A visit supposed to be about friendship became hijacked as memorializing the kami – spirits – of the Japanese fallen. The emperor did express remorse for so many Filipino deaths during the war – 1.1 million – but like other Japanese politicians, he did not offer an apology for Japanese actions.
I was a Filipino soldier.
A soldier of MacArthur.
My denim pants were short cut
My helmet made from a coconut
And the Japs killed us each day.
D’you think it was that easy
To be a soldier of MacArthur?
The coffee was weak and cold
The rice was moldy and old
and all for five pesos a day.
Anonymous
OTHER MEMORIAL
On my first visit to the site at Capas in 2014, my driver took me to a memorial in nearby Tarlac along the McArthur Highway. The Death March Memorial Shrine went up before the National Shrine at Camp O’Donnell. An inverted V stands above bas-reliefs showing the suffering endured along the route of the Death March. The particular site of the monument convenient because lie directly on the McArthur Highway, previously the main north-south route on Luzon, just north of Tarlac. With the development of the Capas National Shrine, New Clark City and the North Luzon Expressway, this site appears to almost as forlorn as Camp O’Donnell once was.