Stories by Mike Comerford
Photographs by Mark Welsh
Daily Herald Staff
Fourth of five parts

Ryan Gonzales stands at attention while wearing the military cap of his grandfather, Bataan Death March survivor Juan Ignatio, at their Bloomingdale home. Ignatio's brother died during the World War II war crime, but Ignatio and his father survived.

CAPAS, Philippines - Camp O'Donnell is a hot and abandoned field dotted by war memorials.

From a distance, two visitors wandering through in search of names on a black marble memorial appear lonely amid acres of open land, overgrown grass and cracked walkways. The solemnity bespeaks the sad, cruel past of this place.

During World War II, tens of thousands of men, American and Filipino, died in this field. They stumbled and were killed where they fell on the infamous Bataan Death March or they died in the prison camp here - all told some 20,000 to 25,000 of them, more than the number who died at the dreaded Confederate internment camp at Andersonville, Ga., in the American Civil War.

The scene seems deserted today at Camp O'Donnell, but it crowds the memories of survivors from the Chicago area. It mingles through the strains of taps emanating from a Skokie man's garage. A Des Plaines businessman remembers his brother, who survived the camp and Death March, only to later be the victim of another war crime. And it haunts a Bloomingdale survivor who returns to the Philippines twice a year but can't quite bring himself to return here.

These are their stories.

Kildare Street taps

Pedro Molina, 89, embraces his horn while standing in the front yard of his Skokie home. A Bataan Death March survivor, Molina still plays military taps in his garage.

On any given weekend morning on Kildare Street in Skokie, birds can be heard singing blocks away. But often their songs will be joined by other, more somber notes as Pedro Molina takes his trumpet in a leather pouch, makes his way to the family garage where the acoustics are good and begins sending the sounds of military taps wafting sadly throughout the neighborhood.

A survivor of both the Bataan Death March and Camp O'Donnell, the 89-year-old former musician and corporal practices to keep his lips in shape for a dwindling number of World War II veterans ceremonies.

In December 1941, Molina was a civil engineering student at the University of the Philippines, but his passion was for jazz and swing music, especially Glenn Miller. He played trumpet in a band.

At the time, the Philippine islands were part of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, a U.S. territory and military stronghold. Two days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a Japanese invasion force landed in the Philippines. Almost immediately, Molina was called up for duty as a corporal in the 23rd Infantry Regiment, 21st Division on the Bataan Peninsula.

The Battling Bastards of Bataan, as they called themselves, fought pitched battles from December through April 1942, but Gen. Douglas MacArthur was forced to retreat, first to nearby Corregidor island and then to Australia. Later he famously vowed, "I shall return."

Those he left behind - about 75,000 soldiers, 63,000 of them Filipino - were told to surrender on Bataan. It remains the largest mass surrender of U.S. forces in history.

Filipinos driving single-piston motorcycles with sidecars, called tricycles, drive by Bataan Death March markers along the route to Camp O’Donnell. Skokie’s Pedro Molina risked his life for a drink of water during the March along this now well-groomed road.

The Japanese had been expecting about half that number. Thus began the Death March to Bataan, actually waves of soldiers on several marches lasting four to 10 horrific days.

Along with his American comrades, Molina found himself at the mercy of the Japanese war machine on April 10, 1942. Serving in the rear guard and having never fired a shot, he had been living on reduced rations. Many with him were malnourished and badly wounded.

They began the long journey to Camp O'Donnell from Marviveles, at the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula, marching in lockstep, four abreast.

Any variation from the rules could result in a death sentence. Sometimes, one Japanese guard oversaw 100 men. Killing the weak kept the line moving. Sometimes, Molina said, guard behavior was simply concentrated cruelty.

Filipinos like Molina were promised that if they cooperated, they would be released, part of the Japanese effort to pacify the islands. But the Japanese weren't honoring that promise anytime soon. Molina saw the sick and injured being shot or sometimes - to save on bullets, historians say - bayoneted.

Thirst often led the prisoners to put their lives at risk. With dead POW bodies fouling the trench water at the roadside, the prisoners were ever on the lookout for artesian springs. Once, spotting one, Molina rushed down an embankment.

"I ran down the hill but if they see you," Molina recalls now, "you are a dead man."

He gulped the water and dashed back to the march.

Maybe he should have kept running for his life. By the time he got to the village of Lubao, he hadn't eaten for four days, having marched more than 40 miles. He didn't know it yet, but he still had 50 more miles to go.

As night fell, the prisoners crowded into a fetid barbed-wire yard. The Filipinos were ordered to sit squatting in straight lines for food. A guard poured hot rice in Molina's cupped hands. He flinched and the rice fell to the ground. Angered, the Japanese guard used the butt of his rifle to repeatedly bludgeon POW Molina on the skull, rendering him unconscious.

"The (cruel) and barbarous act of that soldier, I'll never forget that for as long as I live," Molina would later write in a humble one-page memoir for his family.

If the beating had happened earlier in the day, it likely would have meant death. But the night's sleep restored Molina, and he struggled to his feet for another day's march.

By the time the marchers reached the next mid-sized town, San Fernando, Molina had trekked 55 miles. There, he was loaded onto a freight train packed so tightly he had to stand in the dark, without ventilation. Some soldiers died standing up.

Those who survived the two- to four-hour, 24-mile trip were herded off the train in the town of Capas for another 7-mile hike to a group of temporary bamboo huts in a jungle clearing, Camp O'Donnell.

The Japanese commandant, nicknamed the "Scarecrow" by some of the prisoners, lined the men up for hours telling them the Japanese code of war does not respect soldiers who surrender - so they should expect no mercy here.

The sole source of clean water was a faucet from a well. Some men died of thirst while waiting in line.

About 1,600 Americans died in the first 40 days in Camp O'Donnell, and more than 20,000 Filipinos died in four months. Amid the malaria, dysentery, and starvation, in a bizarre twist of fate, the guards one day essentially asked, ‘Does anyone here play music?' and Molina became part of the all-Camp O'Donnell prisoner ceremonial band, playing at special events. His survival at stake, he learned Japanese songs.

The Japanese made sure the musicians were fed, so Molina got better treatment than his compatriots, even traveling to Manila for events. And on Aug. 31, 1943, as the Japanese began honoring their promise to release Philippine prisoners, he was freed.

Although he may have gained preferential treatment as a musician, he was so bone thin at his release he was immediately hospitalized. Later, his father didn't recognize the skeleton calling himself his son.

The memories became a part of the fabric of Molina's life. Years later, when he went to work on a U.S. Army base in Okinawa, Japan, his initial reaction to his surroundings was visceral.

"At first I hate (the Japanese)," he says. "Then I see those Japanese in Okinawa and say, ‘Here they are kind. Not like the ones that we had on Bataan.' "

These days, some memories have faded. Those that remain cause his face to contort and his eyes to shut tight.

"The trouble is so many died, walking and walking, and falling down, and being shot," he says. "Then the concentration camp and the disease, no food … Sometimes you go to dream and you are able to see it."

So if the neighbors on Kildare Street wonder some quiet weekend morning why they hear taps in the distance, the answer is it's Molina, and this is why he plays.

Tale of two brothers

When World War II broke out, Mariano Hermosa, 30, and his younger brother, Mamerto, in his 20s, imagined themselves fighting the Japanese.

Mariano Hermosa, already settled in Chicago, was sent to the Arctic Circle north of Greenland with a U.S. construction battalion.

"I was happy to serve, but it was 60 below zero and I'm from the Philippines," says Hermosa, who now lives in Des Plaines.

Mariano Hermosa of Des Plaines holds a picture of his days as a manager of the Blue Angel nightclub in Chicago. The Filipino became a successful businessman while his brother survived the Bataan Death March only to be hung by the Japanese as they raped his wife.

Back home, brother Mamerto volunteered in the Philippines and was sent to the Bataan Peninsula.

One brother would live a charmed life in America; the other would suffer a series of war crimes ending with his murder.

Mamerto Hermosa survived the Bataan Death March and, later, the disease and cruelties of Camp O'Donnell. But his miseries only increased after he was freed as part of a prisoner release program and made his way home to his wife and daughter in Santa Lucia, in northern Luzon. There, a collaborator told the Japanese he still might be a combatant, so Japanese soldiers dragged him from his home, put a noose around his neck and hanged him after he watched the soldiers rape his young wife.

A plaque in Santa Lucia memorializes the war crime. Wife and daughter still live in the community but will not talk about those terrible days.

His brother Mariano's American success story started in 1929. The 16-year-old arrived in San Francisco with 85 cents in his pockets. Living on just bread and water, he went door-to-door asking for odd jobs. Eventually, he landed one as a house servant and stayed with the family nine years. Eventually, circumstances led him to Chicago, where he lived when war broke out.

After his service in the war, Hermosa returned to Chicago and became a prominent businessman and philanthropist.

Industrious and resourceful, he rose to become manager of the swanky Blue Angel nightclub in downtown Chicago. On the side, he opened travel agencies, ran a dance troupe and bought buildings - 17 of them at one point.

Hermosa now is 94 years old and lives with his wife of 45 years, Fe, in Des Plaines. Both still are active in Philippine and local volunteer organizations.

America has been good to the couple, but Hermosa doesn't forget the past. He cannot forget the brother who never returned home with him.

"My brother was a martyr," Hermosa says. "My life turned out different in America."

A son tags along

In the spring of 1941, Juan Ignatio was 16 years old and pleaded with his father to let him follow him to war.

Juan Ignatio of Bloomingdale holds his World War II Prisoner of War medal. He lived through the Bataan Death March ordeal with help from his father.

It wasn't patriotism or hatred of the Japanese that motivated Ignatio.

"I just wanted to be close to my father," he says. "I was crying, ‘Can I go with you?' "

Ignatio was too young to join the army or to guess at the savagery waiting outside his small town of San Quentin, north of Manila.

His father was Sgt. Gelacio Ignatio, a hard-as-nails veteran of 31 years in the U.S. Army Philippine Scouts. Sgt. Ignatio had the clout to pull strings, and the next day, father and son marched together out of San Quentin past the rice paddies north of Manila to the Bataan Peninsula.

Then came news that U.S. forces were surrendering.

Juan Ignatio managed to stay close to his father, but his half-brother, Antonio Espiritu, was not so lucky, if that word can apply to anything in the Philippines at the time. Unbeknownst to his family, Espiritu surrendered along with the Americans on Bataan.

So massive was the surrender and so devastating were the conditions that when Sgt. Ignatio and son Juan embarked on the Bataan Death March, they didn't know Espiritu was marching with them.

Teenager Juan soon found himself no match for the conditions. His repeated stumbling and falling might have been a death sentence but for the help of his father, whose efforts Ignatio now recalls as Herculean.

"He almost dragged me to walk," Ignatio says. "If my dad wasn't there, I'm sure I would not have made it."

All three family members reached Camp O'Donnell to find the inhumanity at a worsened pitch. Already weak from wartime privations before the march, Filipinos were dying at a monstrous pace.

Bloomingdale's Juan Ignatio was among these POWs hauling up to 800 bodies a day from Camp O'Donnell to a mass grave site.

Ignatio, the teenager who otherwise would be hanging out with friends and flirting with girls, instead was given the job of hauling dead bodies to mass graves.

The seemingly endless relay of corpses to the mass graves at Camp O'Donnell is a haunting image all those who were there mention. Today, Ignatio doesn't like to talk about it. Eventually, he says only, "I never wanted to see that."

Somewhere amid all this, Espiritu also died. It is likely he's buried in one of the mass graves, but Ignatio shakes his head no when asked if he thinks his half-brother might have been among those he carried to the mass graves.

Ignatio and his father survived the camp, tearfully reuniting weeks after their separate releases.

Sixty years later, Ignatio is a grandfather in Bloomingdale. Yet the scars run deep: He's been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; he doesn't sleep well; he has bouts with temper. He says it helps to meet with other veterans. He's a lifetime member of the American Ex-Prisoners of War, whose Fox River Grove chapter meets monthly in Batavia.

For years, he worked in the kitchen at Elmhurst Hospital, and later as a janitor. Now retired, he returns once or twice a year to his hometown, where he has a home and rice fields.

On the highway from Manila to San Quentin, there's a turn he could take that would lead him to Capas, where there are memorials to the Bataan Death March - one Filipino, one American.

Ignatio knows about the memorials but he never has taken the turn on the highway toward Camp O'Donnell.

"Every time I see the sign that says this way to Capas, I say one day I should go," he says. "But, so far, I can't."

IN PART 4:
• So many died
• The shoes that keep on walking
• Burnham's vision links Chicago with Philippines
• More photos from part 4