From Eberhard Weber.

Tom Holloway (xuegx@CSV.WARWICK.AC.UK)
Mon, 22 Apr 1996 09:46:39 +0100 

Subject: Re: Soldiers captured by japanese WWII

Dear Sarah...
This is Eberhard Weber, the Berlin Schoolboy member of the elders
on this list, and in a round-about way I am answering you because
the war as I saw it has caused a somewhat morbid search for meaning
in many and in myself of what war says about Man.

It was this war as I saw it from my wartime home in Germany and
my subsequent home in the USA that caused me to go to Bataan and
Corregidor and Camp O'Donald, the place where your uncle Mel was
held imprisioned.

I took an outrigger Banka boat from Marivelles on the Bataan
peninsula to the Island of Corregidor.  It is a short distance from
shore, perhaps two miles, I don't recall.  It is an eerie feeling
to see the wrecked piers, and as you walk past the "mile-long"
barracks (as they were called) which are destroyed as everything
else on that strip of land, and past the many guns rusting in place
from which they conducted their war against the japanese and then
against the americans taking the island back, you cannot help but
feel that you are in a church of sorts, on hollowed grounds.  I am
a german, but the sights of battle know no nationality.

I walked over much of that island, saw the Malinta tunnel, the last
holdout, and the bunkers with their mortars and the concrete
bunkers with the bursting star scratch patterns on top where
exploding bombs and grenades forever carved their deadly intent
into the concrete surface. It is eerie even now to write about
that.

It was in 1976 that I went there and there were no other visitors.
I was alone except for my wife who is an American and has never
seen any place of combat.  The stillness dramatized the sanctity
of the ground on which so much blood had been spilled.

Several times during the five years that I was in the Philippines
and other countries in SE Asia I went back to Bataan and other
places and I drove along the road twice where the deathmarch will
forever make this one of the saddest places to tavel.  Now they
built a new road, but the old one is still there.  Just about every
big tree trunk on that road had a sign on it, crudely painted most
of the time, saying "mute witness to the infamous deathmarch".

I retraced their steps to San Fernando where the troops that
survived were herded on to railroad cars for the short distance but
long trip to Camp O.Donald.  Many many of the survivors died on
this railroad.  I cannot forget standing on the track so innocently
hugging the ground and I was frozen in morbid fascination at this
also mute strip of steel lying there.

Then I went on to Camp O'Donald which was then guarded by an
American soldier at the side gate which was the entrance to the
prison camp. When US troops were still stationed in the Philippines
there was a communications site on the ground of that camp.  But
there was nothing there anymore, just empty fields of grass
trying to cover the inhumanity that once existed in its place.
An old farmer nearby told me that every day in the morning,
prisoners would gather up those who died during the night and
carry the bodies across the road I was on to a field on the other
side.  I don't know if they are still there.

So, Sarah, the horrors of war, which was simply life as it was when
I was young, took hold somewhere deep in my conscious and until a
few years ago they drove me with irresistable force to visit many
battlefields in the futile search to make sense of it all.

I think you may want to search for books of the era to learn more
about what your uncle Mel had to endure and why.

Best regards
Eberhard

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Research Project On Global Systems         glosys@valleynet.com