Surviving the march of death

By Cole Short
The Forum - 06/27/1999

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. - Clarence Larson's train pulled into the Kenyon depot shortly after 10 on a cool October night in 1945.

The lean and gaunt Larson descended the depot steps and headed for his family's home two miles east of town.

It was the first time Larson - an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps - had been home in close to six years.

A chiseled young man who'd entered the Army in 1939 to travel the world, Larson returned to Kenyon 80 pounds lighter and burdened by a lifetime supply of painful memories.

A survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps for roughly 31/2 years, Larson was one of an estimated 72,000 soldiers - 12,000 Americans and 60,000 Filipinos - forced to endure the infamous 65-mile trek now known as the Bataan Death March.

"It was hell in so many ways," writes Larson in "A Long March Home," a memoir he authored in 1998. "No food or water for several days in a hot climate which I know was over 100 degrees in the sun, marching on asphalt roads."

Marching four abreast, spaced 5 feet apart, Larson estimates the soldiers stretched 17 miles from beginning to end.

"The Bataan Death March starts," writes the 78-year-old Fergus Falls resident. "We are now truly prisoners of war, beginning 31/2 years of hell."

In the Army now

Larson was raised 50 miles south of Minneapolis, near Kenyon, on a farm where money was tight. Fresh out of high school in 1938, he was drawn by a newspaper ad offering worldwide travel and a monthly salary in the Army.

At the time the "idea of war or fighting hardly entered my mind," he says.

One mid-November afternoon in 1939, after hand-picking a 20-acre corn field, Larson journeyed to Fort Snelling and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Before he left, Larson's mother clung to him and wept, fearing he would never return.

By February 1940, he found himself stationed at Nichols Field, on the outskirts of Manila in the Philippine Islands.

Larson would spend the next year learning to field-strip .45 caliber semiautomatic pistols, pack a parachute and use a gas mask. He finished basic training and spent six months as a military police officer.

"Nichols Field was a soldier's dream," he says.

Brimming with tropical plants and trees, the base featured two-story barracks and a nine-hole golf course nestled in a virtual paradise.

Larson was aware of the escalating tensions in the region, but doubted he'd see live combat.

"We thought the Japanese would never dare attack," he says. "But that wasn't true."

No help in sight

A bugle pierced the morning air at Nichols Field on Monday, Dec. 8, 1941.

"Rumors were flying; Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had been bombed. Curiously, none of us seemed to take the news seriously," Larson says. "But somehow in my heart I knew we were at war."

Undetected Japanese aircraft had attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor the day before, plunging America into its second World War. The next day, Canada, Great Britain and the United States declared war on Japan.

On Dec. 10, Manila radio reported Japanese aircraft dive-bombing Nichols Field.

"They were coming at us directly out of the sun and all a person could do was run for cover," Larson says. "After that raid, we really knew we were in the war."

Japanese planes destroyed most of the buildings and the barracks at the base.

Under the guidance of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Larson's squadron withdrew into the Bataan Peninsula on the southwestern coast of Luzon, the Philippines' largest island.

U.S. and Filipino troops were able to hold off advancing Japanese forces for more than three months, but soon found themselves cut off from outside help.

Supplies ran short and food was scarce.

Soon soldiers turned to cavalry horses for food. Eventually they ate monkeys, snakes, iguanas, grasshoppers, mice, frogs, worms, grass, leaves and weeds.

MacArthur was ordered to Australia and later replaced by Major Gen. Edward P. King Jr., who surrendered to the Japanese April 9, 1942.

Soon after, Larson and his comrades were forced to stack their weapons in a pile for demolition.

"We could not believe that we would ever surrender to the Japanese," he says.

King requested the soldiers be treated under the guidelines set down by the Geneva Convention, but those requests fell on deaf ears.

"Our separation from American society was complete and we were in a state of shock," Larson says. "We had no idea what would happen in the days ahead. We were now in a new world."

March of death

The Bataan Death March wound for 65 miles as mistreated and undernourished soldiers paraded north from the tip of the Bataan Peninsula to prison camps inside the heart of the Philippines.

"One of our stops was at a bridge. ... The water you couldn't even see because there was a green scum covering it," he says. "Some of the guys jumped in ... and started to fill their canteens. I did not, as there was a dead soldier, perhaps several, that had been in the water a couple of days, and in 100-degree sunshine you could imagine the smell."

The Japanese captors seized all weapons and any personal belongings. One American tried to hide a class ring.

"(The Japanese soldiers) made a big joke out of it, but it was not very funny," Larson says. "They held that finger, and after a really messy procedure, they cut it off with a bayonet. It was a painful ordeal for the man. ... I can still see the muscles, tendons, whatever, being pulled from his hand."

The soldier died days later.

Because there was little food, Larson says, more and more bodies piled up along the road as the "mobile torture chamber" continued. Some Filipino soldiers were buried alive.

"We used to be upset when we saw all the bodies in the ditches along the way," Larson says. "Some of these men wanted to be killed as they just didn't care anymore."

Several days after it began, the Bataan Death March mercifully ended at Camp O'Donnell, a former American trading post.

Life in the camps

Soon after, Larson was sent to the 300-acre POW camp in Cabanatuan, where more than 3,000 soldiers died from illness, starvation, torture or beatings.

Larson spent 21/2 years at the camp, passing most days tending crops the soldiers raised.

Late-night escape attempts were common early on, Larson says. But soon soldiers were divided into 10-man squads. If one solider disappeared, the other nine men were executed.

Dead soldiers piled up and were buried in shallow graves. As heavy rains came, the bodies floated to the surface and became fair game for wild dogs.

In July, 1944, Larson boarded a cargo ship to Japan.

"I somehow felt that maybe things would get better," he says.

Larson was wrong.

The "voyage was the worst part of my 31/2-year ordeal."

Packed like animals, prisoners were crammed into a cargo hold for 17 days. Some passed out, urinated and even died standing. Bodies were dumped overboard.

"It was like being a pig, wallowing in our own dysentery in absolute filth," he says.

The boat docked in Japan Aug. 6, 1944.

One big bomb

Larson worked as a slave on the Japanese dockyards shortly after arriving there.

Increased air traffic from American planes signaled a turn in the war and gave prisoners hope.

"Seeing the airplanes made us feel good, but we had one nagging fear," Larson says. "Would we all be murdered as the Americans closed in on Japan?"

Then, during a normal work detail, the gossip spread quickly.

"We could tell our guards were nervous about something. ... After a while we caught on: Just one American bomb had killed many, many Japanese."

Larson still remembers the mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki Aug. 9, 1945, roughly 100 miles away, three days after Hiroshima suffered the same fate.

Soon after, the Japanese admitted defeat.

"We didn't even celebrate," Larson says. "Too many guns still pointed at us."

Larson was rescued and returned to Nichols Field, where he hopped a Navy transport ship back to the United States.

Home at last

Carl and Genora Larson were still awake at 11:30 p.m. when their son came home.

His mother, for a second time, held her son and wept.

"But this time the tears were of joy," Larson says.

Five hours later, the family went to sleep and Larson returned to his childhood bed.

"I went upstairs to the most beautiful bed I'd seen in a long, long time," he says. "I was alive, and I thanked God for getting me back home after living through the war."