Anton F. Bilek - No Uncle Sam: The Forgotten of Bataan

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Book:
No Uncle Sam: The Forgotten of Bataan
Author:
Anton F Bilek / Tony Bilek / Gene OConnell
Publisher:
Kent State University Press
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Books / Detective and thriller
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On April 9, 1942, Gen. Edward King, commander of the Fil-American forces in Bataan, surrendered to the Japanese. To this day, it remains the largest American army in history to surrender, numbering more than 70,000 Filipinos and Americans. After the surrender the Japanese marched their captives to different locations in what became known as the Death March, a 55-mile stretch from Mariveles, Bataan, to San Fernando, Pampanga. Thousands of soldiers died in the march; some were shot by their captors and others succumbed to disease, starvation, or painful dehydration.

Anton F. Bilek was only twenty-two years old when he was captured in Bataan. No Uncle Sam is his story of survival through the Death March, his imprisonment under horrific conditions in the Philippines and Japan, and his servitude as a slave laborer in the Japanese coal mines. Bilek addresses the frustration, anger, fear, humor, hope, and courage that he and other Americans shared during their captivity and their silence about these experiences for many years after their release from the POW camps. After almost 40 years Bilek decided to write about his experiences, and this memoir is the result. Those who are interested in history and the incredible resilience of human beings must read this tale of survival.

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No Uncle Sam

Tony Bilek, in collaboration
with Gene OConnell

The Kent State University Press

Kent & London

THE FORGOTTEN OF BATAAN

NO UNCLE SAM

2003 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2002153654

ISBN 0-87338-768-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

Unless otherwise specified, accompanying photos and illustrations are courtesy of the author from his personal collection.

06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bilek, Anton F., 1919

No Uncle Sam : the forgotten of Bataan / by Anton F. Bilek in collaboration with Gene OConnell.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-87338-768-6

1. Bilek, Anton F., 1919 2. World War, 19391945Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 3. World War, 19391945Personal narratives, American. 4. Prisoners of warUnited StatesBiography. 5. Bataan, Battle of, Philippines, 1942. I. OConnell, Gene. II. Title.

D 805. P 6 B 54 2003

940.54'7252'095991dc21

2002153654

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

I would never have written this book had it not been for the insistence and undying support of my dear wife and sweetheart.

Mildred (Millie) Bilek

19232000

To Millie, I dedicate this book.

Were the battlin bastards of Bataan

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews or nieces.

No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn!

Frank Hewlett

Contents

Anton Tony Bilek, May 1946

Preface

I t took a long time before I could muster up the courage to write about my experiences as a prisoner of war. Those who survived the POW camps, mostly through sheer luck and determination, wanted nothing more than to wipe out the memories of those bad times. After the surrender of Japan in August 1945, we POWS only wanted to move on to better lives: to find a career, get married, raise a family, and most of all forget about our terrible three-and-a-half-year ordeal.

Even though I had lived through that time, saw the things that I saw, and heard the things that I heard, even then most of my experience seemed like a bad dream. The real nightmare, even more than the abuse that we received as POWS , was the fact that our own government had coldly used us as pawns to play for time. It expended us to make up for its own failure to protect the nation and its servicemen from armed aggression. Revelations over the past few years have given credibility to the suspicion that Americas entry into World War II may even have been clandestinely courted. If so, then to the POWS our national policy was unforgivable.

I would go to the POW reunions, but other than that I told myself the last thing my family wanted to dwell on was the rough time I had been through. Surely, they too wanted to bury the war and move on. During the decades that followed, we managed to do that, I thought. The war was over, and family and friends celebrated my return. I married Millie and stayed in the air force, becoming a technical instructor at the same base from which I had started, Chanute Field, Illinois. We bought a home and started to raise our family. World War II receded farther into the recesses of my mind.

But in 1983 something happened that caused me to reconsider my silent stand. I had retired from the air force and had become a civil-service technical instructor. Then, I retired from the civil service to pursue my interest in horticulture. I had opened a flower and garden business and was doing pretty well at it. One of my seed and plant dealers became a close friend and would stay for dinner when he was in town. One night we were sitting around having a drink and shooting the breeze. I had, on occasion, told him stories about my wartime experiences. But on this one night, he had a story for me. My friend said that his great-grandfather had been in the Civil War. His big battle was Gettysburg, in which he had all of the battle experience that he could handle. Then, like me, his great-grandfather decided to just bury his past. Apparently, he did a good job, for my friend told me that his family had always felt left out of a part of their heritage. This Civil War service, which later generations should have been able to point with pride, was instead a great gap in their family history.

The point of his story was not lost on me. I came to realize that maybe I did have something, other than my own perceptions, to consider. I did owe some thread of continuity to my family and all of our descendants as to my World War II experience. I needed to leave an eyewitness account that people could relate to of what an American serviceman caught in the Philippines at the start of the war had to endure.

I realized also that it was something that I owed to another group, the soldiers and sailors who could not write nor tell anyone anything because they never made it back.

So I opened up. Not too long after the conversation with my friend, I began writing my war experiences, usually late at night after everyone else had gone to bed. When the memories began to come back, they could be painful. They were so real at times that I would arm myself with a bottle of bourbon, especially on those nights when I knew that the subject matter was going to be heavy.

Also to prepare myself for this task, I researched and read a lot to expand my POW tunnel vision of World War II. I looked for books and articles about the conflict, especially the Pacific war. I soon found out that the Pacific theater did not receive nearly the coverage that the European theater did, which was to be expected; Europe was where the heavy media coverage was. Still, I found it easy to take the slight personally. Those books written about the Pacific all seemed to deal with Pearl Harbor or the island-hopping campaigns. Few authors addressed the Philippine debacle or analyzed the decisions of either the countrys leadership or the commanders on the scene. This was despite the fact that our surrender in the Philippines in April 1942 was the largest en-masse capitulation in U.S. military history. Nor was there any in-depth coverage of the Bataan Death March or of the inhumane treatment we received while in captivity. (A few historians did write in a comprehending and well-researched manner, especially Walter D. Edmond, John Toland, Richard S. Slater, Mathew S. Klimow, Adrian Martin, and Paul Reuter.)

Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese sent a bombing raid to the Philippines, where they nearly wiped out the entire U.S. force of fighters and bombers there. Without airplanes, we were sitting ducks against further Japanese air attack. We were forced to evacuate with what assets we could to the Bataan Peninsula. All the while we were expecting supplies and reinforcements from the States, but these never came. Even as we were running out of food and ammunition and fighting ourselves into exhaustion, Washington decided to throw in the towel for us. Within the scope of the greater global conflict, we had been reduced to the status of expendable pawns.

It seems that our fate had been sealed as soon as one week after Pearl Harbor, when Gen. George C. Marshall (army chief of staff) and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (deputy chief of war plans for the Pacific) gave a thumbs down to immediate aid to the Pacific theater. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed for a retaliatory bombing raid on the Japanese mainland as a panacea for the home front. Winston Churchill was pressing to make Americas first priority the stopping of the Nazi war machine in Europeno matter that Japanese land invasions in Asia were in full swing and our need for men and supplies was desperate. Still, late in December 1941, American troops took heart when President Roosevelt, in a radio broadcast to the Philippines, sent a message to Pres. Manuel Quezon, in which he referred (vaguely) to positive assistance for our gallant struggle.

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