thedrifter
06-19-07, 04:50 AM
Published on Tuesday, June 19, 2007.
Last modified on 6/19/2007 at 1:02 am
Bataan survivors, vets to meet
By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff
The 3rd and 4th Defense Battalion Marines aren't in the habit of having joint reunions with other groups of veterans, but this year they're making an exception.
In January, when Bill Van Wieren of Fromberg was making arrangements to hold the Marine reunion at the Billings Holiday Inn this summer, he learned that representatives of the Northwest Chapter of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor were making similar plans.
They started talking about a joint reunion almost immediately.
"I thought it was a splendid idea," Van Wieren said, and none of his Marine colleagues had any objections.
For one thing, the Marines had nothing but respect for the members of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. All of them had spent time in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and many of had survived the Bataan Death March, one of the most infamous episodes of World War II.
The joint reunion would also give the Defense Battalion Marines, who manned anti-aircraft and shore batteries all over the South Pacific, an opportunity to view a unique pictorial history of the death march and Japanese POW camps. Billings veteran Ben Steele's collection of 93 paintings and drawings will be on display at the Holiday Inn Thursday through Saturday. The public also is invited to view the exhibit on those days.
Steele, a retired Montana State University-Billings art professor, said 14 or 15 Bataan and Corregidor survivors and numerous family members, are expected for the reunion. The Northwest chapter of the organization takes in Montana, Washington, Idaho and Oregon, and veterans from the Dakotas and Northern California sometimes attend as well.
"This group is kind of a dying institution," said Steele, who turns 90 this year. "We wonder every year if we should meet next year."
The 3rd and 4th Defense Battalion Marines will be coming from all over the country, Van Wieren said, and only 18 veterans are signed up this year, the first time the group will have met in Montana.
"We'll meet every year until there's just two of us left," he said.
Veterans from both organizations will spend most of Thursday and Saturday at the Holiday Inn in informal gatherings, dinners and a business meeting, and on Friday they will go to Hardin for the Custer's Last Stand Re-enactment.
In addition to Steele and Van Wieren, local veterans who will be attending the reunions include Art Klein, a Marine who was captured on Wake Island barely three weeks after Pearl Harbor and spent nearly four years in Japanese POW camps; and Bill Arnold of Billings, who was taken captive in the Philippines in April 1942 and was held as a POW for three years.
Steele, like Arnold, fell into Japanese hands after the surrender of American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, though Arnold was too sick to be sent on the death march. Corregidor was an island bastion that guarded the entrance to Manila Bay. Allied forces there surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942.
Steele was one of nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops who were forced to walk more than 60 miles to a prison camp. Many of them were already sick from a long siege on very short rations, and they were given little to eat and drink on the brutal trek. At least 10,000 prisoners dropped dead or were killed by their captors during the march.
The prisoners were taken first to Camp O'Donnell. Conditions were so harsh that Steele volunteered to be among 325 men assigned to build a road through the Filipino jungle.
"I didn't think it could get any worse than O'Donnell, but I got into something worse," Steele said. They had to walk 26 miles through the jungle for starters, then work 12 hours a day and try to sleep out in the open in heavy rains that almost never quit. It was a second, though little-publicized, death march. Steele said he was one of only 50 men to return to Camp O'Donnell.
To preserve his sanity, Steele, who was raised on a cattle ranch north of Shepherd, began making sketches of his life in Montana on little scraps of paper. He later began adding drawings of scenes in the prison camps and on the Bataan Death March. Those drawings didn't make it home. A Catholic priest to whom he entrusted his drawings went down on a ship in the South China Sea.
As soon as the war ended, Steele started drawing those scenes of horror again, and he has never stopped. His black-and-white drawings and full-color oil paintings have been displayed many times in Billings over the years, but the display at the Holiday Inn will include five oil paintings completed since the last exhibit in Billings, in 1999.
All of Steele's wartime works are on permanent display at the Central Montana Historical Association museum in Lewistown, which built a special wing to exhibit the collection.
Thursday afternoon and evening will be the best time to view the exhibit and visit with Steele, who will be at the reunion all that day. His reminiscences of those days of misery are still vivid, though delivered in a detached way, and some of them are even tinged with humor.
He tells of digging mass graves to bury fellow prisoners, of watching men fight over scraps of food or being shot for stealing an onion. He tells of being packed in the stinking hold of a ship and transported to Japan, where he was a slave laborer in a coal mine.
His best memories are of the fall of Japan, when his captors fled and the prisoners were simply released. It would be another month before they were evacuated, but in the interval they gorged on food dropped in 50-gallon drums by American planes.
"The first thing I got into was a box of candy bars," Steele said. "I ate the whole box." He got violently ill, of course, but he didn't mind. Each of the prisoners also had 10 cartons of cigarettes. It was an unimaginable luxury, and they all smoked greedily.
"The place looked like it was on fire," he said. For days, he couldn't even sleep.
"I didn't want to go to sleep," Steele said. "I wanted to just sit there and gloat over our new-found freedom."
He spent some time on a hospital ship, then at a hospital in San Francisco. From there, he and other former POWs went to Spokane, Wash., for another year.
"We had lots of problems, psychiatric problems, really. And they tried to bring us back into a normal way of life," he said.
Steele's wife, Shirley, said her husband has defied expert predictions.
"When he came home," she said, "the doctor said, 'If you live to be 60, you'll be lucky.' "
He has been back to the Philippines only once, when he and his wife and two daughters visited there in 1999.
"We went the route of the death march in an air-conditioned Mercedes," he said.
Contact Ed Kemmick at ekemmick@billingsgazette.com or 657-1293.
Ellie
Last modified on 6/19/2007 at 1:02 am
Bataan survivors, vets to meet
By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff
The 3rd and 4th Defense Battalion Marines aren't in the habit of having joint reunions with other groups of veterans, but this year they're making an exception.
In January, when Bill Van Wieren of Fromberg was making arrangements to hold the Marine reunion at the Billings Holiday Inn this summer, he learned that representatives of the Northwest Chapter of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor were making similar plans.
They started talking about a joint reunion almost immediately.
"I thought it was a splendid idea," Van Wieren said, and none of his Marine colleagues had any objections.
For one thing, the Marines had nothing but respect for the members of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. All of them had spent time in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and many of had survived the Bataan Death March, one of the most infamous episodes of World War II.
The joint reunion would also give the Defense Battalion Marines, who manned anti-aircraft and shore batteries all over the South Pacific, an opportunity to view a unique pictorial history of the death march and Japanese POW camps. Billings veteran Ben Steele's collection of 93 paintings and drawings will be on display at the Holiday Inn Thursday through Saturday. The public also is invited to view the exhibit on those days.
Steele, a retired Montana State University-Billings art professor, said 14 or 15 Bataan and Corregidor survivors and numerous family members, are expected for the reunion. The Northwest chapter of the organization takes in Montana, Washington, Idaho and Oregon, and veterans from the Dakotas and Northern California sometimes attend as well.
"This group is kind of a dying institution," said Steele, who turns 90 this year. "We wonder every year if we should meet next year."
The 3rd and 4th Defense Battalion Marines will be coming from all over the country, Van Wieren said, and only 18 veterans are signed up this year, the first time the group will have met in Montana.
"We'll meet every year until there's just two of us left," he said.
Veterans from both organizations will spend most of Thursday and Saturday at the Holiday Inn in informal gatherings, dinners and a business meeting, and on Friday they will go to Hardin for the Custer's Last Stand Re-enactment.
In addition to Steele and Van Wieren, local veterans who will be attending the reunions include Art Klein, a Marine who was captured on Wake Island barely three weeks after Pearl Harbor and spent nearly four years in Japanese POW camps; and Bill Arnold of Billings, who was taken captive in the Philippines in April 1942 and was held as a POW for three years.
Steele, like Arnold, fell into Japanese hands after the surrender of American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, though Arnold was too sick to be sent on the death march. Corregidor was an island bastion that guarded the entrance to Manila Bay. Allied forces there surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942.
Steele was one of nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops who were forced to walk more than 60 miles to a prison camp. Many of them were already sick from a long siege on very short rations, and they were given little to eat and drink on the brutal trek. At least 10,000 prisoners dropped dead or were killed by their captors during the march.
The prisoners were taken first to Camp O'Donnell. Conditions were so harsh that Steele volunteered to be among 325 men assigned to build a road through the Filipino jungle.
"I didn't think it could get any worse than O'Donnell, but I got into something worse," Steele said. They had to walk 26 miles through the jungle for starters, then work 12 hours a day and try to sleep out in the open in heavy rains that almost never quit. It was a second, though little-publicized, death march. Steele said he was one of only 50 men to return to Camp O'Donnell.
To preserve his sanity, Steele, who was raised on a cattle ranch north of Shepherd, began making sketches of his life in Montana on little scraps of paper. He later began adding drawings of scenes in the prison camps and on the Bataan Death March. Those drawings didn't make it home. A Catholic priest to whom he entrusted his drawings went down on a ship in the South China Sea.
As soon as the war ended, Steele started drawing those scenes of horror again, and he has never stopped. His black-and-white drawings and full-color oil paintings have been displayed many times in Billings over the years, but the display at the Holiday Inn will include five oil paintings completed since the last exhibit in Billings, in 1999.
All of Steele's wartime works are on permanent display at the Central Montana Historical Association museum in Lewistown, which built a special wing to exhibit the collection.
Thursday afternoon and evening will be the best time to view the exhibit and visit with Steele, who will be at the reunion all that day. His reminiscences of those days of misery are still vivid, though delivered in a detached way, and some of them are even tinged with humor.
He tells of digging mass graves to bury fellow prisoners, of watching men fight over scraps of food or being shot for stealing an onion. He tells of being packed in the stinking hold of a ship and transported to Japan, where he was a slave laborer in a coal mine.
His best memories are of the fall of Japan, when his captors fled and the prisoners were simply released. It would be another month before they were evacuated, but in the interval they gorged on food dropped in 50-gallon drums by American planes.
"The first thing I got into was a box of candy bars," Steele said. "I ate the whole box." He got violently ill, of course, but he didn't mind. Each of the prisoners also had 10 cartons of cigarettes. It was an unimaginable luxury, and they all smoked greedily.
"The place looked like it was on fire," he said. For days, he couldn't even sleep.
"I didn't want to go to sleep," Steele said. "I wanted to just sit there and gloat over our new-found freedom."
He spent some time on a hospital ship, then at a hospital in San Francisco. From there, he and other former POWs went to Spokane, Wash., for another year.
"We had lots of problems, psychiatric problems, really. And they tried to bring us back into a normal way of life," he said.
Steele's wife, Shirley, said her husband has defied expert predictions.
"When he came home," she said, "the doctor said, 'If you live to be 60, you'll be lucky.' "
He has been back to the Philippines only once, when he and his wife and two daughters visited there in 1999.
"We went the route of the death march in an air-conditioned Mercedes," he said.
Contact Ed Kemmick at ekemmick@billingsgazette.com or 657-1293.
Ellie