WHEN MEN MUST DIE: AN ALABAMA POW AT BATAAN

After five days on the march, Bert staggered into San Fernando, where he and more than a hundred other prisoners were prodded into a musty World War I-era steel boxcar-designed to hold only forty-for a tortuous, twenty-four-mile journey. Many prisoners, suffocating under the oppressive heat, fainted. Those suffering from dysentery soiled their threadbare uniforms. Others died standing upright, unable to slump to the floor. When the train finally screeched into Gapas, in Tarlac Province, dozens fell out onto the station platform gasping for fresh air. Six miles later, Bank found himself standing before the gates of Camp O'Donnell, the first of three squalid Japanese prison camps that he would call home for the next three-and-a-half years. Unlike nearly seven hundred of his countrymen and ten thousand of his Filipino allies, he had survived the Bataan Death March. But his ordeal was only just beginning.

Approximately seventy thousand weak, emaciated, and forlorn American and Filipino prisoners staggered into Camp O'Donnell, an unfinished American base used by the Japanese as a temporary prison camp. As the Japanese refused them medical treatment and issued little food and water, O'Donnell became a giant morgue. An estimated fifteen hundred American and eight thousand Filipino prisoners died within the camp's first forty-five days of operation. Somehow, while his friends succumbed to the effects of starvation, disease, and torture, Bert managed to stay alive.

On june 4, 1942, alongside nearly fifteen thousand new prisoners from Gorregidor (the island had finally capitulated on May 6), Bert was transferred to a new camp, Gabanatuan. Since the beginning of the war, his weight had dipped from 185 to 130 pounds. "The fellows would tell me how good I looked," said Bert. "The average weight was eighty-five or ninety pounds."

Bert spent almost five months fighting for his life and his sanity at Gabanatuan before being transferred once again, this time to Davao Penal Colony, a virtually escape-proof Filipino "Devil's Island" on the remote southern isle of Mindanao. Because of his steadily worsening physical condition-severe malnutrition had by this time rendered him almost completely blind, and his weight plummeted to 102 pounds-he would do little work on the colony's sprawling agricultural plantation. But he was not the only one suffering. Bizarre, some even fatal, maladies afflicted the weakened prisoners. Many suffered from "limber neck" and were temporarily unable to hold up their heads without the help of their arms. Scurvy raged, despite the fact that citrus fruit and vegetables were plentiful at Davao. Other prisoners succumbed to rice poisoning, a parasitic disease that killed by infecting sores that the men received while working barefoot in mud up to their knees in the paddies. Many suffered from assorted types of paralysis because of the poor diet.

Bert, the unflappable joker, did his best to keep up the morale of his fellow prisoners with his unique sense of humor. As a testament to his efforts, when ten Americans escaped from Davao in April 1943-the only mass escape from a Japanese prison camp during the war-and subsequently broke the story of the Death March and Japanese atrocities to the world, several traveled to Alabama to visit Bert's parents. "[Bert] was the source of more laughs than anyone I knew in Davao," wrote one of the escapees, Bert's late friend Sam Grashio, in his postwar memoirs.