A Contextual and Content

Analysis of Bataan
Death March

Submitted to:
Mrs. Cresalyn B. Betita
Submitted by:
Mick Bryan A. Javonillo
Transcript:
Cindy Kelly: Today is December 3, 2013. I’m Cindy Kelly, President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. With
me, I have Lester Tenney. I’m going to start by asking Lester to say your name and spell it please.

Lester Tenney: Lester Tenney, L-E-S-T-E-R, Tenney, T-E-N-N-E-Y.

Maybe you could start by telling us where you were born and what your childhood was like?

Tenney: I was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 1, 1920. I spent most of my young career in and around
Chicago. I joined the 192nd Tank Battalion National Guard on September 25th of 1940. I wanted to get my years
over with for the fact that they started the enrollment inscription or volunteer service. So, I wanted to get my
year over with. So, I joined the National Guard knowing that it was going to be mobilized in November of
1940. So, I knew that at the time. I didn't know where I was going to go or what I was going to do, but I wanted
to finish my one year.

Kelly: So, what happened?

Tenney: I finished my one year as I landed in Manila. One year later, I ended up in Manila on November 25th of
1941. And of course as you know, the war started just a week or so after that. That’s where I ended up serving,
was in the Philippines.

Kelly: So tell us about what was your job? What did your company do?

Tenney: I was a radio operator and then I became a tank commander. This was all during the time of the
fighting on Bataan and in the Philippines. We were in the first tank battle. In fact, the first tank battle of World
War II was in the Philippines and it was on December 23rd of 1941 when our tanks met the Japanese up at
Lingayen. Unfortunately no one knows about that. But, that was the first tank battle that the United States was
in in World War II.
They [the Japanese troops] had artillery. They had flamethrowers. They had everything aimed at us. We went in
with five tanks and within a matter of five minutes we lost our first tank. Lt. Ben Moran was the tank
commander of the first tank and the first tank was hit with a shell in the track. Once a track is hit you can do
nothing. The second tank, a shell went through the bow gunner’s seat and took the bow gunner’s head off. It
went right straight through the tank. The third tank was destroyed pretty well. So, we had five tanks. Three of
them were hit. Then, we ended up making a reverse to get out of there.
In the Philippines the tanks didn't have a wide area to maneuver. We were on a road, one road with one tank
behind the other. If you stop and think of it, the only tank that could fire at the enemy was the lead tank. The
second tank, if he were to fire at the enemy he was going to hit the lead tank. So, tanks in the Philippines was
not a very wise move. But, we were there anyhow. And, right after that we started the strategic withdraw down
into Bataan, which was a part of the orange plan that was designed in 1935-36, that if Japan should attack the
Philippines it was agreed to that we would have what was known as the Bataan Peninsula, is where we would
all congregate and wait for supplies from Pearl Harbor. That was back in 1935 and ’36. Little did they know
that there would be no Pearl Harbor available for us. So, that’s what really happened.

Kelly: So the battle was engaged, you say, just before Pearl Harbor? When was the battle?

Tenney: The first tank battle was on December 23, 1941 up at Agoo—A-G-O-O—up in Lingayen Gulf.

Kelly: At what point did you successfully reach Bataan?

Tenney: We started down around December 25th, down into the peninsula known as Bataan. It was a piggyback
operation. The infantry would lead first, then the artillery would lead, and the tanks would stay there on the
frontlines to hold the enemy off until our forces were about fifteen kilometers down. Then, they would set up.
Once the forces would set up, then the tanks would leave. So, it was piggyback—the infantry, the artillery, and
then the tanks. So, the tanks were always up in the frontline protecting the other troops until we landed back
into the peninsula known as Bataan.

Kelly: So tell us what happened there.

Tenney: There we spent the next four and half months fighting the Japanese on a day-to-day basis, night-to-
night. The Japanese would try to come down from these frontlines. They established a frontline at the Pilar-
Bagac Road.
Well, the turning point came sometime in the first part of April when the Japanese didn't get Bataan to surrender
and it was a thorn in their side. They couldn’t accept the fact that they were still fighting when they expected to
win in 45 days. What they did was they had a whole flotilla of Japanese forces with Yumata on the way to
Australia. They turned them around and brought them back to the Philippines to capture Bataan. On the third of
April is when the battle really started all over again. But at that time, it was a very serious battle. There was no
time during the morning, noon, or night that there was not gunshot. The Japanese kept coming down. They
would step over their dead. Our machine guns got so hot that the barrel would just curve like that. The barrel
turned like that. So, once the machine gun’s barrel started to turn we would leave. It was a horrible situation
until April 8th.
General McArthur sent word down to our General [Edward P.] King and sent a message from his post in
Australia. The message was: “This garrison will not surrender. If all else fails you will charge the enemy.”

McArthur wanted the men to die fighting. He did not want them to surrender. General King felt that if he did
not surrender the forces then, Bataan would be known throughout the world as the slaughtering point of World
War II.

So General King, in spite of the order from General McArthur, and knowing that he could be court marshaled,
ended up surrendering all the forces on Bataan. That was 12,000 Americans and 58,000 Filipinos. Seventy
thousand troops were surrendered that morning, April 9th of 1942. No one knows anything about Bataan. We
know a lot about Pearl Harbor and other things, but nobody knows about Bataan, unfortunately.

Kelly: Seventy thousand.

Tenney: Then the march started to take us to prison camp. It became known as the Bataan Death March. It was
called the Bataan Death March not because of how many died, although out of the 12,000 Americans only about
1700 lived to come home at the end of the war. But, the reason it was called the Death March was because the
way they killed you. If you stopped walking you died. If you had to defecate, you died. If you had a malaria
attack, you died. It made no difference what it was; either they cut your head off, they shot you, or they
bayonetted you. But you died if you fell down. So, that was why it was called the Bataan Death March, because
the bodies were strung along the side of the road. A man would die, they would kick the body onto the side of
the road or put him on the road and let a Japanese truck roll over them. It was barbaric slaughter. It was just—
nothing else to say. That’s what happened on Bataan until we got to your first prison camp.
We had no food or water. The temperature was about 106, 108 degrees. We were all sick. We all had malaria,
dysentery. We had gunshot wounds, bayonet wounds. We were in no position to walk and yet we had to do that.
We were on 1/3 rations from July 13th. We were on 1/3 rations. We were eating iguanas, monkeys, and snakes.
That was our diet. So, we were in no position to really make a march. And, that’s what happened to us.

Kelly: So, how many made it through?

Tenney: Well, we’ll never know. The true number has never been calculated because we don't know how many
died along the side of the road where the Japanese just never bothered burying the body at all. So, we only
know the number that were captured on Bataan was around 12,000, maybe 11,800 and something. The number
that actually came home that we could pretty well attest to was about 1200, maybe 1500 men total. So we lost,
during that 3 ½ years—from the time of the surrender to the time of the end of the war, in that 3 ½ years, of that
12,000 men, I would say we lose 10,500 of them.

Kelly: Would that be true of the 58,000 Filipinos?

Tenney: No, although it was very bad for the Filipinos. The Japanese treated them really bad. But, they were
allowed to go back to their barrios, to their little homes, to their villages. So, in spite of the fact that many of
them started the march, many of them were able to leave the march and blend in with the rest of the civilians
and/or just go back home. The Japanese did allow the Filipinos to go back home. So, they never did have the
total problem that the Americans had.
We were Caucasians to the other race. We were just no good. The Japanese had a philosophy. They lived on the
Bushido code of conduct. The Bushido code of conduct was one that said you shall not surrender. If you
surrender you're a coward. So, if you surrender you're a coward. If you surrender, you're lower than a dog. No
one would do that. The Americans, who surrendered, were treated as they were a dog all that time because that
was their philosophy. That’s what we had to live with all those years. It never changed.

Kelly: Of course that’s at odds with Geneva Agreement.

Tenney: Those who lived to get to that first prison camp, what happened there was again the men were dying at
200-250 a day from the effects of the march, from dysentery. We had no water. You would see water on the
side of the road in carabao wallows. The carabao would sit in there and bathe. We would see that and spread the
scum along the side and just drink the water. The result was dysentery, real bad dysentery.
So, when we arrived at that first prison camp, some of the men that were alive, they died within the next thirty
days just from the dysentery that they had contracted. It was just plain slaughter all along the way. If you lived
through the first prison camp, then they took—in my particular case, they took 500 of us and put us in the hull
of a ship and gave us ½ cup of water a day and ½ ration of rice a day, ball of rice. We went on our way to
Japan. It took thirty-two days and we were in the hull of a ship. The men who died on the ship, the survivors
would sort of hold an auction for the ration of the rice and the water of the dead men. It’s not the kind of thing
you want to even think about, but it was there.

We lived on the ship, going to Japan. We ended up in Japan. Our particular ship with 500 men got there alright.
But, in the total picture, there were twenty-six ships that American POWs—Americans that were capture on
Bataan, Corregidor, and other islands in the Philippines. Of the twenty-six ships that went, twenty-six ships
went down in the water with the prisoners in it because the Japanese refused to put POW markings or Red Cross
markings on the ships. So, the Americans bombed the ships—torpedoes and bombs and submarines. Twenty-six
ships went down. We lost about 10,000 men just in the water. So, we’re talking about a horrific situation that
we had to live through.

Now, once we lived and got to Japan, our group—my 500 men and myself—we ended up being sold to Mitsui
Coal Mine. Mitsui bought us from the Japanese military at so much a head and we ended up shoveling coal. I
shoveled coal in a Japanese coal mine twelve hours a day, every day, for three years. The only way you got out
of work is if you got hurt, and sometimes you had to get hurt by doing it yourself. So, we broke our own bones.
We broke our own hands, legs, arms, foot, whatever we could break to see if we could get a couple of days out
of work in the mine. That’s how we lived for the next three years.

We didn't know anything about that first atomic bomb that was in Hiroshima. We knew something was up
because of the Japanese in the coal mine told us that there was a big bomb and big explosion. A lot of people
were killed. But, we knew nothing about it until the 9th of August, I believe it was, of 1945 when we heard an
explosion and we saw a tremendous cloud rise. We were in our prison camp in Omuta, which was right across
the bay from Nagasaki. So, it was the bomb at Nagasaki that we heard. I guess we were witnesses to it because
we were right there. We didn't know what it was. But, the war ended one week later.
 Contextual Analysis
Both Filipinos and Americans will never forget what happened on 9th of April 1942, where our bravery
and will to live has been proved all over the world. Lester Tenney is one of those who survived the Bataan
Death March. He was born on July 1, 1920 in Chicago, Illinois. He spent most of his career in and around
Chicago. He joined the 192nd Tank Battalion National Guard on September 25th of 1940. Lester Tenney also
survived the three and a half years of slave labor as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.When he was
released at the war’s end, he learned that his wife had remarried, believing he was dead. He suffered from what
came to be known as post-traumatic stress, but he married again and built a life in the academic and business
worlds. He died on February 24, 2017 in Carlsbad, California at the age of 96

The Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF), founded by Cynthia “Cindy” Kelly in 2002, is a non-profit
organization in Washington, DC, dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Manhattan Project and
the Atomic Age and its legacy. The Foundation’s goal is to provide the public not only a better understanding of
the past but also a basis for addressing scientific, technical, political, social and ethical issues of the 21st century.
Cindy Kelly was born in Lexington, Kentucky. After obtaining her B.A. from the University of Kentucky in
1975. Cindy travelled to Florence, Italy, where she earned her Master of Art and Master of Fine Art Degrees
from the famed Rosary Graduate School of Fine Art.

The primary source was written in transcript form and was written on December 3, 2013 by Cynthia
Kelly, founder of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. The interview was about the life of Lester Tenney before,
during and after the Bataan Death March. The Bataan Death March was forcible transfer by the imperial
Japanese Army of around 70,000 American-Filipino prisoners of war from Saysain Point, Bagac, Bataan and
Mariveles to Camp O’Donnell, Capas, Tarlac, via San Fernando, Pampanga, where the prisoners were loaded
onto trains. The transfer began on April 9,1942 when General King surrendered all the forces on Bataan after
the three month battle in the Philippines during World War II. This will reach the heart of the people who have
experience and for those who are interested to know the truth about this traumatic incident.
 Content Analysis
The primary source is the half of the transcript form of the interview of Lester Tenney about his
experience in The Bataan Death March. The interviewer started by introducing herself and so as the
interviewee. At the first part of the transcript, we can see the life of the interviewee before the incident. The
middle part of it is during the incident where in the interviewee experienced, and thus the last part is on how the
interviewee suffers again after the traumatic incident up to the war ended.

Both the interviewee and the interviewer are Americans and a part of the source mention that Filipinos
never did have the total problem that the Americans had, disregarding the fact that there are still Filipinos who
experienced all of the interviewee had experienced. The Japanese Army had this Bushido code of conduct that
said you shall not surrender. If you surrender you're a coward. If you surrender, you're lower than a dog. So
what happened is that all of the Bataan troops that surrendered were treated exactly lower than a dog.
 References
https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/lester-tenneys-interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I3_vMlPqBQ

Wikipedia

https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/content.html

https://wwwnationalww2museum.org/war/articles/bataan-death-march-survivor-lester-tenney-dies-age-96

https://blog.premium-papers.com/2012/03/01/contextual-analysis-its-definition-and-methods/