WHEN MEN MUST DIE: AN ALABAMA POW AT BATAAN

IMPRISONED FOR YEARS IN THE DEATH CAMPS OF BATAAN, BERT BANK AND HIS FELLOW PRISONERS OF WAR WONDERED IF UNCLE SAM HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT THEM. WHEN HOPE WAS ALMOST GONE, A DARING RESCUE BROUGHT THESE "GHOST SOLDIERS" BACK FROM THE DEAD. BY JOHN D. LUKACS

THE DETAILS ARE DISTANT and shadowy. The sounds echo faintly in his dreams-chattering machine guns and ear-splitting explosions meshed with trembling voices and the rumble of thousands of feet trampling the jungle. The pungent perfumes of gunpowder juxtaposed with the alluring aromas of delicate tropical flora, waft fleetingly beneath his nose. He may not have seen what was happening, but Bert Bank will never forget what happened the night of January 30, 1945. It was the night he and more than five hundred seemingly forgotten ghosts were resurrected from the dead.

After the fall of the Philippines to the Imperial Japanese Army in the dark, early days of World War II, nearly twenty thousand marooned American military personnel were subjected to some of the most barbaric treatment ever afforded prisoners of war. From the infamous Bataan Death March to the horrors of squalid Japanese prison camps, these individuals witnessed the unbearable: beatings, executions, and other atrocities. Of the original American troops consigned to this fate, more than half never lived to tell their stories. Thanks to arguably the most daring commando raid in the history of the United States Army, lifelong Tuscaloosa-native Bert Bank, an Army Air Corps pilot turned prisoner of war, was one who did. This is his story.

BERTRAM BANK WAS BORN in 1914 to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated to the United States from a village near the Polish border. he grew up on the coalfields of Tuscaloosa County near the small mining town of Searles. The Great Depression had all but decimated his father's restaurant and plumbing businesses, but Bert somehow saved up enough money to realize his dream of a college education and enrolled at the University of Alabama. The affable extrovert spent four cherished years at the Capstone, working at the school paper, drilling with the R.O.T.C. detachment, and making friends, one of whom was a rugged, lanky football player named Paul Bryant.

He intended to pursue a career in law, but with the winds of war sweeping the nation, Bert soon found himself flying dive-bombers instead of filing legal briefs. Assigned to the 27th Bombardment Group at Hunter Field in Savannah, Georgia, lieutenant Bank trained in the skies by day and entertained his share of Georgia belles-including the winner of the 1939 Miss Georgia pageant-by night. On

November 20, 1941, Bert and his comrades arrived at Fort McKinley in the Philippines. But Bert would have less than three weeks to enjoy Manila, the "Pearl of the Orient." News of the attack on Pearl Harbor had reached even the most remote American military outposts by the early morning hours of December 8. But, save for some barracks bluster and anxious card-game chatter, there was little cause for alarm among U.S. military personnel in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, swarms of Japanese attack planes, recently dispatched from nearby Formosa, were bearing down on American military installations. Filipino farmers, pausing in their rice paddies, tilted their gazes skyward as the metallic drone of hundreds of propellers swirling in unison thundered southward. At about 12:30 P.M., almost thirty twin-engine Mitsubishi bombers appeared in the azure skies over Clark Field, about seventy miles north of Manila on Luzon. Within minutes, whole squadrons of B-17 bombers and pursuit planes, lined up wing-to-wing on the runway for refueling, were destroyed in massive, orange fireballs. Over the next few hours, the same, sobering scene would be played out at U.S. bases throughout the archipelago. American air power in the Philippines-save for a handful of slow, obsolete P-40 fighters, rigged with chicken wire and wooden planks, later known as the "Bamboo Fleet"-were effectively eliminated as a fighting force. Bert Bank, both literally and figuratively, had lost his wings. But he would not be immobile for long.

"On Christmas Eve, General Douglas MacArthur moved everybody to the Bataan Peninsula," said Bert. "All air force personnel became infantry. They put all of us on the front lines. We were fighting as infantry with no training."

If ever there were a perfect place for a desperate last stand, it was the Bataan Peninsula. Measuring approximately twenty-five miles in length and twenty miles wide from coast to coast, Bataan in 1942 was a shadowy, foreboding, and mountainous green hell with only two real roads and precious few traces of modern civilization. Several colossal, yet dormant, volcanoes lorded over a steamy jungle realm of rice paddies, nipa huts, majestic palm trees, and lush undergrowth. It was in these hostile environs that nearly thirteen thousand American troops and ninety thousand green Filipino recruits were consigned to a grisly fate to buy time for their fellow countrymen. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the veteran Imperial Japanese Fourteenth Army opposing MacArthur's forces, was given fifty days to take the Philippines, and Tokyo's plans for the conquest of the Pacific depended on his punctuality.

Within a few weeks, the jungle and Japanese naval blockade began to do what the Japanese Army could not: wear down the intrepid Fil-American troops known as Luzon Force. Field hospitals overflowed with wounded, and supplies of medicine dwindled. Malaria, dysentery, and other debilitating tropical diseases ran rampant through the lines, while the blockade created a pressing food shortage. After observing the beleaguered troops for several weeks, United Press war correspondent Frank Hewlett was inspired to pen these immortal lines:

We're the battling bastards of Bataan;

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam;

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces;

No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces.

...And nobody gives a damn.

In March 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt effectively declared the Philippines lost by ordering MacArthur to Australia. MacArthur, along with his family and general staff, narrowly escaped from his command post on the nearby fortress island of Corregidor. Following his escape, he announced famously, "I came through, and I shall return."

Because they had been fighting and starving in a virtual information vacuum, many of the troops on Bataan did not learn of MacArthur's exit until several days, even weeks, after the event. When the news finally filtered through the front lines by radio broadcasts and word of mouth-the "bamboo telegraph"-many troops felt betrayed. "You could call it mad," said Bert. "We were naturally upset with him."

Although surrounded, outgunned, starved, diseased, and abandoned, Bert and his comrades-still holding out hope that their country would come to their aid-fought on. But help would never come. The troops on Bataan would be sacrificed as America's leadership focused on Adolph Hitler. secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had grimly foreshadowed their fate, saying: "There are times when men must die."

On April 9, the "Battling Bastards of Bataan" were finally subjugated. Major General Edward Postell King, the commander of Luzon Force, reluctantly crossed his own lines with a cadre of aides and a tattered white flag. During a brief ceremony near Lamao at 12:30 P.M., King unconditionally surrendered Luzon Force. Many Fil-American troops got word of the surrender by listening to a stirring, static-filled broadcast of the "Voice of Freedom."

"Bataan has fallen," said broadcaster lieutenant Norman Reyes. "The Philippine-American troops on this war-ravaged and bloodstained peninsula have laid down their arms. With heads bloodied but unbowed, they have yielded to the superior force and numbers of the enemy... Bataan has fallen, but the spirit that made it stand, a beacon to all the liberty loving peoples of the world, cannot fail."

A dazed Captain Bank, the recent recipient of a battlefield promotion, reluctantly laid down his arms and headed to the southern port village of Mariveles. "We had no idea in the world what the Japanese were going to do," he said. "But we found out real quick."

When King surrendered the shattered remnants of Luzon Force, he assumed that the amalgam of American and Filipino prisoners would be treated in accordance with the rules prescribed by the Geneva Convention. But Tokyo had never found time to ratify the Geneva agreement. Instead, Japan's fanatical, ultranationalist leaders, like twentieth-century shoguns, chose to adhere to the ancient warrior code of Bushido, which stipulated that any individual who surrendered was a traitor to his own country and, therefore, rightly deserved any harsh treatment he received-including death.

The Bataan Death March-depending on where and when a prisoner joined the slow, suffering column-was actually a series of forced marches lasting from five to ten days, covering approximately sixty-five miles from Mariveles to the rail hub of San Fernando, in the northern province of Pampanga. Bert weaved through the smoldering jungle, passing abandoned, fire-gutted, olive-drab vehicles licked by dying flames and centuries-old banyan trees splintered by shrapnel and shell. Through the choking dust clouds kicked up by the ghost-like, khaki silhouettes plodding in front of him, he spotted artesian wells bubbling with cold, clear spring water, but he dared not stop. Bert quickly learned that the Japanese summarily executed anyone who strayed from the march. Each evening, the drained, disease-wracked prisoners would collapse in a vacant schoolyard or sugarcane field. Lucky prisoners received a single ball of rice, about the size of a baseball, to eat. Most received nothing.

At first light, cracks of rifle fire echoed throughout the rolling green hills. Some guards pumped bullets into those physically unable to keep the grueling pace; others delivered death with samurai swords. As the blistering midday sun slowly arced across the powder-blue tropic skies, temperatures soared to stifling, triple-digit figures. Prisoners watched helplessly as guards gunned down weak comrades who stopped to rest without permission or others who made the fatal mistake of possessing anything stamped "Made in Nippon"-the logic of the guards being that one had to have taken the object from a dead Japanese soldier. Even the desperate, thirst-crazed men who lunged for roadside carabao wallows-shallow pools of filthy, brackish water in which floated bullet-riddled corpses and the rotting carcasses of dead horses-received swift, fatal reprimands from Japanese bayonets. Inflated with rage, yet weak, unarmed, and powerless to interfere, they could only watch the slaughter in utter disbelief. For four months, they had seen comrades killed honorably by bombs and shells and bullets in combat. But they had not been prepared for this. Questions abounded in Bert's mind, and answers were not forthcoming.

"The thing in my mind when we started the Bataan Death March was, what happened? America's abandoning us," says Bert. "We didn't understand this."

Bert was stunned as the surreal scene continued to unfold in front of his bleary, disbelieving eyes. Sympathetic Filipino civilians, including pregnant women and small children, caught throwing food or flashing the "V for Victory" sign in the direction of the prisoners were beaten savagely with rifle butts or even murdered. Many survivors remember watching Japanese tanks deliberately run over crippled GIs. Bert, along with several other Americans, was pulled off the march and forced at bayonet-point to bury a Filipino alive. "Just before throwing the last shovel of dirt on his body, the Filipino moved and a Japanese guard was ordered by this officer to bayonet him through the stomach," recalled Bert.

After five days on the march, Bert staggered into San Fernando, where he and more than a hundred other prisoners were prodded into a musty World War I-era steel boxcar-designed to hold only forty-for a tortuous, twenty-four-mile journey. Many prisoners, suffocating under the oppressive heat, fainted. Those suffering from dysentery soiled their threadbare uniforms. Others died standing upright, unable to slump to the floor. When the train finally screeched into Gapas, in Tarlac Province, dozens fell out onto the station platform gasping for fresh air. Six miles later, Bank found himself standing before the gates of Camp O'Donnell, the first of three squalid Japanese prison camps that he would call home for the next three-and-a-half years. Unlike nearly seven hundred of his countrymen and ten thousand of his Filipino allies, he had survived the Bataan Death March. But his ordeal was only just beginning.

Approximately seventy thousand weak, emaciated, and forlorn American and Filipino prisoners staggered into Camp O'Donnell, an unfinished American base used by the Japanese as a temporary prison camp. As the Japanese refused them medical treatment and issued little food and water, O'Donnell became a giant morgue. An estimated fifteen hundred American and eight thousand Filipino prisoners died within the camp's first forty-five days of operation. Somehow, while his friends succumbed to the effects of starvation, disease, and torture, Bert managed to stay alive.

On june 4, 1942, alongside nearly fifteen thousand new prisoners from Gorregidor (the island had finally capitulated on May 6), Bert was transferred to a new camp, Gabanatuan. Since the beginning of the war, his weight had dipped from 185 to 130 pounds. "The fellows would tell me how good I looked," said Bert. "The average weight was eighty-five or ninety pounds."

Bert spent almost five months fighting for his life and his sanity at Gabanatuan before being transferred once again, this time to Davao Penal Colony, a virtually escape-proof Filipino "Devil's Island" on the remote southern isle of Mindanao. Because of his steadily worsening physical condition-severe malnutrition had by this time rendered him almost completely blind, and his weight plummeted to 102 pounds-he would do little work on the colony's sprawling agricultural plantation. But he was not the only one suffering. Bizarre, some even fatal, maladies afflicted the weakened prisoners. Many suffered from "limber neck" and were temporarily unable to hold up their heads without the help of their arms. Scurvy raged, despite the fact that citrus fruit and vegetables were plentiful at Davao. Other prisoners succumbed to rice poisoning, a parasitic disease that killed by infecting sores that the men received while working barefoot in mud up to their knees in the paddies. Many suffered from assorted types of paralysis because of the poor diet.

Bert, the unflappable joker, did his best to keep up the morale of his fellow prisoners with his unique sense of humor. As a testament to his efforts, when ten Americans escaped from Davao in April 1943-the only mass escape from a Japanese prison camp during the war-and subsequently broke the story of the Death March and Japanese atrocities to the world, several traveled to Alabama to visit Bert's parents. "[Bert] was the source of more laughs than anyone I knew in Davao," wrote one of the escapees, Bert's late friend Sam Grashio, in his postwar memoirs.

In late 1944, as the tide of the Pacific war shifted in America's favor, and it began to look as though MacArthur would soon be making good on his promise to return, the Japanese ferried Bert back to Gabanatuan. When he arrived, Bert discovered that most of the inmates occupied mass graves or had long since been shipped to slave labor camps on mainland Japan. What remained inside the barbed wire of Gabanatuan on the night of January 30,1945, were approximately 513 living skeletons-the "elite of the damned," wrote author Hampton Sides in the 2001 bestseller, Ghost Soldiers-suffering from malnutrition, beriberi, dengue fever, dysentery, and malaria, among other debilitating tropical diseases. The prisoners referred to themselves as "ghosts" and believed that their country had abandoned them to certain death at the hands of their fanatical captors.

Of course, little did Bert and the rest of his comrades know that lurking just outside the perimeter of the camp was a group of more than one hundred American commandos from the elite Sixth Ranger Battalion, plus groups of Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas. Led by Colonel Henry Mucci-nicknamed "Little MacArthur" because he also enjoyed smoking a corncob pipe-the tiny strike force had slipped undetected through nearly thirty miles of enemy territory to complete its mission of rescuing the doomed ghosts of Bataan and Gorregidor.

Shortly after dusk, the quiet camp erupted in a cacophony of gunfire and explosions. Sharpshooters systematically mowed down Japanese guards, and rangers splintered guard towers and barracks with a barrage from automatic rifles. Chaos ensued. As bullets hissed through towering clumps of cogon grass, Bert and a group of prisoners shambled into a drainage ditch for cover. Soon the dazed POWs heard strange voices barking commands in English. Fearful of a Japanese ruse that would lead to the prisoners' execution, Bert stayed put. "I didn't move," said Bert. "I told everybody, 'Don't go, that's the Japs.'"

Even though the rescuers identified themselves as "Yanks" and walked and talked like Americans, many of the prisoners shared Bert's concerns. To the gaunt, starved prisoners, the strapping, healthy Rangers in strange fatigues resembled alien giants stalking the shadows. They bristled with unfamiliar weapons like bazookas and didn't even look like American soldiers. After all, when the prisoners laid down their arms in 1942, the U.S. Army was still outfitted in World War I-issue "doughboy" helmets and old-fashioned leggings.

Suddenly, a Ranger appeared before Bert's group. "Run for the main gate," he yelled. Not a prisoner budged. "What the hell is the matter with you people, don't you want to be free?" Groping blindly in the dark, Bert reached out to touch the Ranger.

"Where are you from?" Bert asked.

"Oklahoma."

"That's good enough for me," said Bert. "Take me with you."

Private Alvie Robbins, a Ranger originally hailing from Alabama, discovered a frightened prisoner cowering in the corner of one of the barracks. To this man, the return of the U.S. Army was too good to be true. "I thought we'd been forgotten," he exclaimed, tearfully.

"You're not forgotten," said Robbins, helping the man to his feet. "We've come for you."

The Rangers then crashed the camp's main gate and assembled the startled prisoners for their long-awaited exodus. In less than thirty minutes, a convoy of men and wooden carts pulled by lumbering carabao began the perilous journey back to the American lines with an enraged Japanese Army in hot pursuit. After a long, harrowing evening, the Americans were in the clear. Despite two casualties among the liberators, Mucci considered the mission a complete success. The next morning, the ex-prisoners and their exhausted rescuers were loaded aboard trucks near the Rizal Road and arrived safely at their destination amid a flurry of popping flashbulbs and cheers.

"The liberation by the Rangers was a great, great thing," says Bert. "If they hadn't been successful, the Japanese would definitely have eliminated us."

The resurrected "ghosts" were treated to an unlimited menu from the 12th Battalion Replacement Center field kitchen, given much-needed medical attention, and greeted by General MacArthur himself. According to Bert, a visibly emotional MacArthur shook hands with the former prisoners and personally welcomed each man back. "One guy said to him, 'How come it took you so long?'" said Bert. "Then MacArthur said, 'Thank God I got back.'"

Bert spent the early part of 1945 convalescing overseas and steadily regained his sight. he returned home to Tuscaloosa and, after checking out of Northington General Hospital with a clean bill of health, was promoted to the rank of major. Bert spent the remainder of the war a celebrity, traveling the country selling war bonds for the Treasury Department.

After detailing the story of his horrific ordeal in a book entitled Back From The Living Dead, Bert left the service in 1946. Despite suffering from recurring nightmares like many former prisoners, he made a highly successful transition to peacetime life. he became a radio entrepreneur, eventually owning several Tuscaloosa stations, which, at the request of his old friend Bear Bryant, he used to help create the Crimson Tide football radio network. he entered politics in 1966 and was elected to three terms, two in the Alabama House of Representatives and one in the Senate and served as floor leader in the administrations of three governors-George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, and Albert Brewer. he also ran for lieutenant governor in 1978, but lost in a tight race. Between his political and business careers, Bert found time to raise two sons-Ralph and Jimmy-with his late wife of thirty-four years, Gertrude.

Bert retired in 1985, but he still maintains an office at WTBC as "producer emeritus" and attends every Alabama football game, home and away (he's missed just three games in the past forty-eight years), with the station broadcast team. After the death of his wife, he was reunited with Emma Minkowitz Friedman, the former Miss Georgia he had met more than sixty years earlier in Savannah, and remarried in 1997.

Almost six decades later, Bert has not forgotten his country. he tells his story regularly at schools and at meetings of Kiwanis and Rotary clubs across the state. He's been the guest speaker at dozens of Memorial and Veterans Day events for years. He's even given pep talks to Crimson Tide athletic teams. In short, he'll sound the praises of his country anywhere and for any audience who will listen. That's because Bert Bank, once forgotten himself, will never forget the night his country came back for him.

Copyright University of Alabama Press Fall 2003
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