Monday, April 3rd, 2006
WWII Courage Focus of Book
By Polly Summar
Journal Staff Writer
It has been 64 years since the American servicemen who were defending the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese.
Of the some 75,000 U.S. and Philippine servicemen who surrendered, some 1,800 were New Mexicans serving in the 200th Coast Artillery. After the Philippines fell that day, the POWs endured the torturous Bataan Death March, named for the conditions the men faced on the arduous trek to POW camps on the Bataan peninsula.
For many U.S. citizens, the story of the men's bravery has become muted among the headlines of more current wars and their atrocities.
But now a new book, called "Silent Voices of World War II: When Sons of the Land of Enchantment Met Sons of the Rising Sun" (Sunstone Press, $22.95) helps explain not only the story of what happened but New Mexico's connections with the Japanese during those years.
"It's about when New Mexicans met the Japanese either at the end of a gun or behind a barbed wire fence," said historian Nancy R. Bartlit in a recent interview. Bartlit and the late Everett M. Rogers, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico, wrote the book together using research and oral histories.
Bartlit will be the keynote speaker at the Bataan Commemoration on Sunday. She has lived in New Mexico for 44 years, after studying world history at Smith College and then teaching English in Japan.
"The book is based on research and oral histories of people who participated in the war," Bartlit said, "and those involved the New Mexico National Guard who were in the Philippines at the time the Japanese attacked Clark Air Force Base the same day as Pearl Harbor, and the men of the New Mexico National Guard who were the first to fire at the Japanese Mitsubishi airplanes and the last to lay down their arms when all the American forces surrendered on April 9, 1942."
Bartlit said the reason their contribution is so important is that the men held off the Japanese army for about four months, preventing them from taking the Dutch East Indies' oil fields and from invading Australia. "They held off the Japanese invading army and gave the Allies more time to gather their resources and resupply."
Besides that story, the book looks at three other stories of courage. "The second story is the Navajo code talkers, and who they were and why they were so important," said Bartlit, explaining that their code was never broken by the Japanese, "although we broke their code. It allowed us to take those Pacific Islands. Their commander said we never could have taken Iwo Jima without the code talkers and that it shortened the war by one year."
The third story in the book is about the Manhattan Project. "It's about the research that went on in Los Alamos to develop the two atomic bombs simultaneously because they weren't sure either one would work," Bartlit said.
"They knew the uranium one would work if they could get enough uranium material to make a bomb, but they weren't sure if they could get enough by the time they needed it."
The plutonium bomb needed a different design, Bartlit said, "and that's the one they weren't sure that would work."
The fourth story is about the Santa Fe internment camp for Japanese Americans. Bartlit says the detention camp was opened in the spring of 1942 and closed that fall. It was reopened in the spring of '43 and was one of the last camps to be closed in April of '46.
"Our book tells how these four different ways of trying to win the war in the Pacific were interrelated," Bartlit said. "For instance, when local Santa Feans learned how poorly their men were treated as POWs in the Philippines, they tried to storm the Japanese-American internment camp."
Bartlit said that when the internment camp finally closed, the men who came back from the war lived in the barracks. "Then Allen Stamm bought the land and took the barracks down and put up the houses in what is now Casa Solana," Bartlit said. "And some of the men who came back from POW camps in Manchuria and Taiwan moved into the houses."
Tying in another connection, Bartlit said that, if the bombs hadn't been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "then these men we're honoring on April 9 would not be alive. They would have all been exterminated if we had had to invade Japan because the commanders of the various prison camps were told to exterminate all traces of the prisoners."
WHAT: Bataan Commemoration
WHEN: 10 a.m. Sunday, April 9
WHERE: Eternal flame memorial outside the Bataan Memorial Building, next to the State Capitol
