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WHEN MEN MUST DIE: AN ALABAMA POW AT BATAAN

Alabama Heritage, Fall 2003 by Lukacs, John D

IMPRISONED FOR YEARS IN THE DEATH CAMPS OF BATAAN, BERT BANK AND HIS FELLOW PRISONERS OF WAR WONDERED IF UNCLE SAM HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT THEM. WHEN HOPE WAS ALMOST GONE, A DARING RESCUE BROUGHT THESE "GHOST SOLDIERS" BACK FROM THE DEAD. BY JOHN D. LUKACS

THE DETAILS ARE DISTANT and shadowy. The sounds echo faintly in his dreams-chattering machine guns and ear-splitting explosions meshed with trembling voices and the rumble of thousands of feet trampling the jungle. The pungent perfumes of gunpowder juxtaposed with the alluring aromas of delicate tropical flora, waft fleetingly beneath his nose. He may not have seen what was happening, but Bert Bank will never forget what happened the night of January 30, 1945. It was the night he and more than five hundred seemingly forgotten ghosts were resurrected from the dead.

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After the fall of the Philippines to the Imperial Japanese Army in the dark, early days of World War II, nearly twenty thousand marooned American military personnel were subjected to some of the most barbaric treatment ever afforded prisoners of war. From the infamous Bataan Death March to the horrors of squalid Japanese prison camps, these individuals witnessed the unbearable: beatings, executions, and other atrocities. Of the original American troops consigned to this fate, more than half never lived to tell their stories. Thanks to arguably the most daring commando raid in the history of the United States Army, lifelong Tuscaloosa-native Bert Bank, an Army Air Corps pilot turned prisoner of war, was one who did. This is his story.

BERTRAM BANK WAS BORN in 1914 to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated to the United States from a village near the Polish border. he grew up on the coalfields of Tuscaloosa County near the small mining town of Searles. The Great Depression had all but decimated his father's restaurant and plumbing businesses, but Bert somehow saved up enough money to realize his dream of a college education and enrolled at the University of Alabama. The affable extrovert spent four cherished years at the Capstone, working at the school paper, drilling with the R.O.T.C. detachment, and making friends, one of whom was a rugged, lanky football player named Paul Bryant.

He intended to pursue a career in law, but with the winds of war sweeping the nation, Bert soon found himself flying dive-bombers instead of filing legal briefs. Assigned to the 27th Bombardment Group at Hunter Field in Savannah, Georgia, lieutenant Bank trained in the skies by day and entertained his share of Georgia belles-including the winner of the 1939 Miss Georgia pageant-by night. On

November 20, 1941, Bert and his comrades arrived at Fort McKinley in the Philippines. But Bert would have less than three weeks to enjoy Manila, the "Pearl of the Orient." News of the attack on Pearl Harbor had reached even the most remote American military outposts by the early morning hours of December 8. But, save for some barracks bluster and anxious card-game chatter, there was little cause for alarm among U.S. military personnel in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, swarms of Japanese attack planes, recently dispatched from nearby Formosa, were bearing down on American military installations. Filipino farmers, pausing in their rice paddies, tilted their gazes skyward as the metallic drone of hundreds of propellers swirling in unison thundered southward. At about 12:30 P.M., almost thirty twin-engine Mitsubishi bombers appeared in the azure skies over Clark Field, about seventy miles north of Manila on Luzon. Within minutes, whole squadrons of B-17 bombers and pursuit planes, lined up wing-to-wing on the runway for refueling, were destroyed in massive, orange fireballs. Over the next few hours, the same, sobering scene would be played out at U.S. bases throughout the archipelago. American air power in the Philippines-save for a handful of slow, obsolete P-40 fighters, rigged with chicken wire and wooden planks, later known as the "Bamboo Fleet"-were effectively eliminated as a fighting force. Bert Bank, both literally and figuratively, had lost his wings. But he would not be immobile for long.

"On Christmas Eve, General Douglas MacArthur moved everybody to the Bataan Peninsula," said Bert. "All air force personnel became infantry. They put all of us on the front lines. We were fighting as infantry with no training."

If ever there were a perfect place for a desperate last stand, it was the Bataan Peninsula. Measuring approximately twenty-five miles in length and twenty miles wide from coast to coast, Bataan in 1942 was a shadowy, foreboding, and mountainous green hell with only two real roads and precious few traces of modern civilization. Several colossal, yet dormant, volcanoes lorded over a steamy jungle realm of rice paddies, nipa huts, majestic palm trees, and lush undergrowth. It was in these hostile environs that nearly thirteen thousand American troops and ninety thousand green Filipino recruits were consigned to a grisly fate to buy time for their fellow countrymen. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the veteran Imperial Japanese Fourteenth Army opposing MacArthur's forces, was given fifty days to take the Philippines, and Tokyo's plans for the conquest of the Pacific depended on his punctuality.

WHEN MEN MUST DIE: AN ALABAMA POW AT BATAAN

Alabama Heritage, Fall 2003 by Lukacs, John D

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