To visit Thomas R. Harrison in his comfortable east bench condominium, it's hard to match this relaxed and articulate 73-year-old man with the horrors of his World War II years.
When you listen to him and leaf through the book he wrote about his war experiences, the plush sofas and beautiful paintings fade. The stark images he conjures are of American and Filipino soldiers suffering from scorching heat, thirst so severe it actually maddened men, exhaustion, a blinding sun, hunger, diarrhea, slave labor, starvation and malaria.Harrison is a veteran of the siege of Bataan, which began Jan. 7, 1942; the infamous Bataan Death March that followed; and three years of misery in Japanese prison camps.
Yet he never let the horrors conquer him. After the war, he returned to his native Salt Lake City and launched a career as an engineer. He retired from leading an engineering group at Hercules Inc.
Harrison earned an Army commission through the ROTC at the University of Utah. In summer 1941 the young lieutenant was sent to the Philippines. Stationed at Fort Stotsenburg, now known as Clark Field, he was assigned as an instructor for the 2nd Battalion, 21st Field Artillery of the Philippine Army.
On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, he and a fellow Salt Laker, Col. Richard C. Mallonee, planned to play a round of golf in nearby Baguio.
"He said, `Let's turn on the radio.' It took a little while for the tubes to warm up on the radio. And the first thing we heard was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Well, that killed the golf game."
Japanese Zero fighter planes and twin-engine bombers flew toward Clark Field and installations around Manila. The American air bases were destroyed.
The American instructors worried about the Philippine army. "We were anything but ready," he said. The Filipinos had been recently mobilized, being drilled with wooden guns as the Americans tried to teach them to take orders.
For the light artillery, the first problem was to get equipment. Eventually they were issued a couple of transport trucks and enough World War I British 75mm guns to create three batteries of field artillery.
"In the beginning we didn't even have any ammunition," he remembered. Although they had telephones to direct the artillery, there were no wires.
With "this hodgepodge of equipment, untrained men - many of them barefoot" they set up a beach defense at the Linguayen Gulf. That was a logical place for the Japanese to invade, with its good beaches and relatively few inhabitants. But on Dec. 10, 1941, Japanese troops landed on the northerntip of Luzon Island. Other landings followed through December.
"Almost immediately, the Japanese started coming south, and they were pretty good and were able to roll us up on our right flank. So we began a series of withdrawals."
Americans and Filipinos concentrated in the Bataan Peninsula, where they contended with shortages of all kinds. Through the early months of 1942, they hung on. "You were actually in combat" during the siege, he said.
"By that time, we were running out of most things. We didn't have much fuel left, didn't have ammunition." They had almost no food, and the shortage was exacerbated by the many refugees within the lines.
"So finally we just ran out of everything."
In April, surrender was imminent, and the artillery pieces in danger of capture. "You loaded a high explosive shell in the breech, and you put another one in the muzzle, facing into the breech." The detonation destroyed the gun.
After the surrender, an estimated 75,000 men, including 12,000 Americans, began the forced march to a Japanese prison camp. About 10,000 to 12,000 died on the 60-mile Bataan Death March, and many more died in the prison camps. By war's end, half of those captured at Bataan were dead.
What was the worst part of the death march? "For me, it was thirst and hunger and no rest," he said.
Asked if the Japanese captors were contemptuous or cruel, he answered: "Both. They bayonetted a lot of guys and beat a lot of folks with their rifle butts. It was a pretty sad occasion."
Did he personally see mistreatment? "I experienced it. I find it difficult. . . ." he said, and he was unable to talk for a moment.
He referred the reporter to the book that he published in 1989, "Survivor: Memoir of Defeat and Captivity, Bataan, 1942." The book graphically relates the suffering of the men.
For much of the time, they were forbidden to stop and fill their canteens as they marched through the merciless heat. "The thud of a rifle butt on your back teaches obedience in a hurry," Harrison wrote.
Once allowed to drink, they were so desperately thirsty that some would gulp from a scummy water hole even if a corpse lay on the bank. "We began to see deaths from exhaustion and sickness added to those caused by the guards."
Following the march, he spent the rest of the war in prison camps in the Philippines, then Japan. He worked in a steel plant - "a real primitive plant, not like the ones we built for them after the war," he told the Deseret News.
"We didn't know anything about the (atomic) bomb. We were stuck in a little camp at that time not far from Kyoto," he said.
"Just all of a sudden, the war was over. As a matter of fact, we didn't even know that until two weeks after the war was over." He had survived, although by 1945 he weighed only about 95 pounds.
Even then, it took American troops a week to locate the camp. Eventually, four Air Force B-29s flew low over them and opened their bomb bay doors. To the delight of the famished men, the bays were filled with "food and clothing and magazines and candy - it was quite a show. . . . You just stuffed yourself."
Speaking of the Japanese today, he said, "I'm resentful. . . . They're still, in my view, arrogant. They'd still like to rule the Pacific, if not politically, then industrially. I never buy Japanese cars."