Letters From a Prisoner of War Camp
Peacetime Army Officer
Our grandfather Santiago Garcia Guevara (1899-1996), a native of the Philippines, was a 1923 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the 10th Filipino to earn a commission in the U.S. Army through the West Point Foreign Cadet program. After graduation, Santiago returned to his native country where he settled into a fulfilling and rewarding peacetime military career, married, and had a family.
War in the Philippines
In December 1941 the Guevara family resided in the mountain resort town of Baguio, where Santiago was serving as Commandant of Cadets at The Philippine Military Academy. Hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, the war arrived in the Philippines. Santiago and his cadets armed for battle, while Carmen and the children fled to her sister’s home in Manila. The family would suffer humiliation, depredation, and enemy occupation for the next three and a half years.
Bataan and the Death March
Santiago and his cadets opposed a beach landing, then retreated to the Bataan peninsula where they fought valiantly, were bombed, strafed, and propagandized, and battled disease, starvation, death, and despair for more than three months. The surrender of April 1942 brought on different horrors: The Bataan Death March, and – for the fortunate who survived combat and the forced march – internment as prisoners of war.
Camp O’Donnell
Camp O’Donnell Prisoner of War Camp was one square mile in size, and was split by the Capas-O’Donnell Road into two parts: the 9,000+ Americans POWs were interned in the smaller north side with Santiago and the other 47,000+ Filipinos on the other. Overcrowding, limited access to water and medicine, disease, and outright cruelty quickly took their toll. For the first two-plus months that Camp O’Donnell was in operation, an average of 225 prisoners died each day. Burial parties ran continually. Nearly half or more of Filipinos that entered the camp in April would die there by July, as would almost 1 in 5 Americans. Author and historian Hampton Sides wrote that “it was extermination not in the Nazi sense, but through malign neglect.”
Camp Visits and Guava Details
Carmen visited Camp O’Donnell a on multiple occasions, a two to three hour trip by car or train before the war but a seven or more hour ordeal each way during the occupation. POW squads were authorized to exit the compound under guard each day for work details, the most grim being the near-constant burial parties. Carmen witnessed at least one of these bleak parades and noted how ”very, very thin” the dead men were. One of the more pleasant and necessary duties was that of “guava detail,” which gathered guava leaves that were later boiled and used to help heal dysentery. Carmen recalled passing a note to a guava detail one day, and Santiago arranging to be a part of the group the next day.
POW Letters
The two also exchanged letters. We have eleven letters, though more were apparently written. The original letters were written on both sides and folded into 1” x 2” rectangles with the delivery address showing, possibly for easy concealment. The following are excerpts from the POW letters, dated April-July 1942. (Note: a Cochero is a carriage driver, one who often carried messages from town to town. “Cochero news” came to mean unsubstantiated rumor.)
“If you would have a chance, send thru somebody 1 pr. shorts, 1 sport shirt (short sleeve), 1 pr .drawers, 1 pr. socks, and 1 can of biscuits, if they will allow you.”
“The death rate here is still appalling and has not decreased (500) a day. So with this rate unless they release us we shall all be finished in two months and a half.”
“I just thought that I need a toothbrush & toothpaste (or soda) to clean my set of teeth”
“I hope you were able to leave on May 19 for Manila as it would have been hard to leave the next day as it rained hard and the wind was blowing quite a bit… I understand the J—s are quite strict now in guarding the “guava detail” as this morning they were allowed only some five or ten minutes to speak to their wives and at a distance of ten yards. We were quite lucky that day when we met as we conversed for over an hour.”
“It is starting to rain here and one of the things I shall need is a rain coat. I wonder if you brought that raincoat from Baguio? The one I brought is lost.”
“Col Dalao is sick with pneumonia…I understand he needs vitamins but I did not get any of those vitamins you sent me, so I have none to give him.”
“It is hard to have you send me things which are not sure of being delivered to me. I have heard of lots of off. supposed to rec’d something from their wives but have not rec’d any of them.”
“There are all sorts of rumors. They seemed to be all cochero news, so unless you can give me some definite ones I shall take all of them like a dose of salt.”
“There has been a lot of rumor about release, that it would be really soon – that we are expecting it any day now.”
“That’s Not My Daddy!”
Santiago ultimately emerged from the Prisoner of War Camp in August 1942, and was able to rejoin his family by September. In the words of his daughter, our then-four year-old father “took one look at the wounded man, gaunt with malaria and yet swollen with beriberi and said, ‘That’s not my daddy!” My daddy had black hair and shiny shoes!'” Santiago’s hair had turned nearly completely white in battle and captivity.
Excerpted and adapted from West Point, Bataan, and Beyond: Santiago Guevara and the War in the Philippines © 2016 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.
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