After 75 Years, Veteran Will Receive Honors for WWII Service

DEC. 31, 2020 | BY C. TODD LOPEZ, DOD NEWS

The Navy and the Connecticut Air National Guard on Monday will honor Connecticut native son Dan Crowley for fighting against the Japanese in the Philippines 75 years ago.

Crowley enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in October 1940 at the age of 18. Less than six months later, in March 1941, he arrived at the Nichols Field air base near Manila in the Philippines.

In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Almost immediately afterward, they bombed airfields in the Philippines — including Nichols Field where then-Army Pvt. Crowley was stationed. That raid destroyed all the hangers there and other infrastructure. Crowley and others worked to defend that airfield against the Japanese attack, but their efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Weeks after the bombing of Nichols Field, Crowley and others sailed about 25 miles across Manila Bay to the Bataan Peninsula in the dark of night.

Fighting on the Bataan Peninsula eventually forced the Americans there to surrender — but Crowley and others didn’t want to give up. Instead, they snuck off to Corregidor Island, which was about five miles south. But about a month after Bataan was surrendered, Corregidor also fell to the Japanese, and Crowley and others were held as prisoners of war.

The Japanese took the POWs from Corregidor back to Manila and held them at Camp Cabanatuan. To escape the horrid conditions at the camp, Crowley volunteered for a work detail to help build an airfield for the Japanese on Palawan Island. He and others worked to build an airstrip using only hand tools.

After Crowley and others returned from their work on the airstrip, Crowley was shipped off to Japan to be a slave laborer in a copper mine in March.

After being liberated on Sept. 4, 1945, Crowley returned home to his family in Connecticut. He was honorably discharged from the Army in April 1956.

While in the Philippines, Crowley participated in combat against the Japanese as part of the Army’s Provisional Air Corps Infantry Regiment on Bataan and later with the 4th Marines Regimental Reserve.

Interview with Daniel William Crowley [1/28/2011]

Robert Weisel:

This is Bob Weisel, I am interviewing Dan Crowley who is a World War II veteran, served in the US Army, and tells me for thirty days he served with the US Marine Corps. His birthday is 5/29 — 5/22 — no I’m sorry, 5/29/22, and we are the only people here, at this interview. So, Dan, let me ask you a couple quick questions, you already told me that you enlisted in 1940. You joined the US Army–Daniel William Crowley:

— Air Corps.Robert Weisel:

Where did you do your basic training?Daniel William Crowley:

Never had one day of basic training.Robert Weisel:

Why not?Daniel William Crowley:

Should I pick it up and just run with it? Okay. Two other fellows and myself just decided to join the military and take a long trip somewhere at the expense of our country. And then come home as soon as we could. In those days you could buy yourself out after one year, for a token sum, which was quite large then. So, we went to Bridgeport to enlist and they turned us down because they had no openings. They didn’t know a war was raging. And then we proceed to Newhaven we’re told the same thing, and he said “Possibly, you can find some openings in Hartford” so we drove to Hartford — this is all in one day. We arrived in Hartford, the federal building, and the fella recruiting said “You’re very lucky. I have three openings in the Philippines. You are lucky.” So we said “Wonderful, that sounds like a nice long trip. And we then enlisted. We reported to Fort Slocom New Rochelle the island off New Rochelle.Robert Weisel:

What’s that Fort?Daniel William Crowley:

Fort Slocom.Robert Weisel:

S-l-o-Daniel William Crowley:

c-o-m.Robert Weisel:

Okay.Daniel William Crowley:

And we just hung around and dressed up like soldier boys with no training whatsoever, and nothing to do. And we had to beg for a pass to go ashore to New Rochelle if we wanted to see our lost loves before we left for the Philippines.Robert Weisel:

How long were you there?Daniel William Crowley:

We were there from October until January 2nd, ’41, when we boarded a trip transport at the Brooklyn Navy yard and sailed off to the Philippines. We stopped at South Carolina and picked up a bunch of poor things from the hills dressed in World War I woolens. As they came aboard we couldn’t believe what we were seeing with their choke collars in this — in the warm South. We arrived — we sailed down the coast, stopped in Panama and then on to San Francisco. And they kept us on an island in San Francisco Bay until they had an available transport, which happened to be one that we confiscated from the Germans in World War I. An ancient freighter called the U.S. Rant. We blew a silverhead off Hawaii in a typhoon and lived in there and spent ten days stuck in tents, the same routine as Fort Slocom or the island in San Francisco Bay. Couldn’t get off the base. Surviving with barbed wire. They were afraid we might ‘go over the hill’ as they said in those days. So on we went, stopping in Guam which was the first time in years they permitted transport of troops, as they call them today, to come ashore. You had to go in, in small boats cause there were — was no pier. And they had two industries, Coca Cola and rum. So you can imagine what happened during our visit. It was a grade b movie scene tearing the whole stuffing town of Ingada, the capitol, tearing it up (inaudible). So on we went from there and arrived in the villa, March of 41 after that long journey, January 2nd to March, I forget the day but it was the first week in March. Again the farce was repeated when we were transported to tents at what was called Nickelsfield, just outside of the villa. We were put up in tents in a swamp, and had to put the legs of the cots in buckets of water to keep the red ants from eating us alive. And again, we had to wait to go out and see what the world was in the villa. So I won’t get into those details, but finally, about October they finished building a wooden barracks for us and the effort should have been put into building the defenses instead of the barracks. There we were in the villa when Pearl Harbor was hit, and we left the barracks during the 17 hours that we had as a warning time before the bombs fell on the Philippines. In that 17 hours, our top management led by General MacArthur, went into a total panic state, in the villa, couldn’t make a decision on launching our 35 bombers to the known targets where the japs were going to take off from. MacArthur refused to give permission to our Air Corp general who wanted to at least try to bomb the Jap targets. Because Pearl Harbor had already been bombed, but no, they finally gave permission when the bombs were falling already on Clarksfield and Nickelsfield, wiping out the US Army Air Corp with one stroke. The Jap aircraft were able to stay over the target in a leisurely manner, back and forth, ‘til they annihilated everything, all the aircraft, all the fuel supplies and lots of men of course. And we had nothing to fight with.Robert Weisel:

Let me just back up. What were you duties between March and Pearl Harbor?Daniel William Crowley:

Duties: we would march like the king’s horses and king’s men. We would march from the tents to the airstrip and wipe wings and do other silly things such as learning how to change oil and service the aircraft, and march back again before noon and that was our day, even though war was raging in the world. It was a leisurely state. We also had to assemble the P40 Modern aircraft that they had sent us in pieces. And we had a Colonel, who fortunately was an aeronautical engineer by training and he organized teams to assemble these planes. Believe it or not, that w — that air pilots, who were old men to us, but they were in their early twenties and mid-twenties — had to learn to fly them. And in the course of their learning, they killed more pilots than died in combat. Because the P40 was a difficult plane to fly after flying a rotary engine plane. It was nose-heavy with a liquid cool engine and as they turned to make their landing approach they would forget to put enough power on and plow into the ground instead, So that was another blundering episode of mismanagement. We had no modern antiaircraft guns. They had plenty of time to send them to us. That was the five-inch ’38 gun which was deadly in those days. We had three inch WWI antiaircraft guns and they were very small numbers. And it was a National Guard, antiaircraft regiment that was from New Mexico that was federalized and they arrived a few weeks before the Japs struck. So they had no preparation training and they had too few guns they were all manual operated and cluttered. We had World War I infantry, water-cooled, browning machine guns for antiaircraft defense. And there was one 20 millimeter that we could hear firing during the raid, we don’t know who even manned it. But that was the only might defensive weapon we had and the Japs brushed it off like brushing away flies. And they would just proceed down and low as possible, so they wouldn’t miss targets and back and forth ‘til they destroyed everything. We then were shipped back out. Myself, along with my squadron were called antiaircraft defense, now that the aircraft were destroyed. And we had these not only World War I liquid cool browning machine guns but the really ancient British, I believe the British gun, with the 90-round drum on top. I forgot the name of it. Pre-dated World War I. It was totally inaccurate, but it made noise. I was put on one which had three of them linked up through a piece of angulard (?) which was an improvisation by our armorers. And they stuck three of these pieces of ?angulard? welded to a metal pole — I guess some kind of pipe — and had placements surrounded by sand bags above the ground. All of our placements were above ground. No preparation whatsoever for the real world, for the real war. So, when the Japanese attacked, thank god I had left my position, to get coffee. The coffee truck had arrived and I had a canteen cup of coffee in my hand, first in line behind the truck. Boiling hot coffee, just as they hit. I was so far from my gunner placement I couldn’t make it, I think I just threw the coffee in the air and dove into the ground. And thank God I didn’t make it, because it was blown totally away, as was all the other ridiculous antiaircraft defenders. Everything was in flames, the whole air field was burning and there were a few surviving plains in the we had built. They should has been scattered all over smaller fields all over the Philippines, but they didn’t know enough to in those days. So, we stayed there from that attack which was December 8th in the Philippines until Christmas Eve of 1941. We got on trucks after dark, went to Manila. We were going to be transported to Australia, that was the word. (Laughter.) We got all into our boats, Filipino boats which was the only type of transportation available and a handful of the remaining aircraft were flying. The air-raid warning went off and we thought it was the Japs and we were all trapped this port area, waiting for the boat but thank god it was the few remaining P-40s flying above us, to defend us. I do not think that would has been able to had they been attacked though. So the next morning we thought we must be well on our way to Australia. We wound up off the tip of the Tab Peninsula across Manila Bay from Manila. And we landed there, not knowing where the devil we were. And we marched up the road to an encampment and piled up what little supplies we had brought with us. Christmas dinner, for myself and 3 other fellows was a can of tomatoes, as I recall that was it. From there we marched into the jungle to take our defensive position back and I have a photograph of myself getting off the truck which appeared in Life magazine, believe it or not and we had been informed by our intelligence people that 100 Japanese had landed the night before and we were going to clean them out. 200 plus ground crews of (laughter) the air corps, untrained totally, not one day of any kind of proper basic training. We hardly know which end the bullet came out of, the saying goes. And the rifles were World War I Springfield 03s. All our equipment was leftover World War I garbage. The ammunition mostly was corroded, of course, and the hand grenades wouldn’t go off, one out of ten would go off they were so ancient. We’d marched into the jungle to throw these hundred Japs back in the water, talking at the top of our lungs, single file ‘til the man in the lead hit the beach on the coast of Bataan. Then the trees erupted. They were up in the trees, all around us. And it turned out there weren’t a hundred Japanese, there were 5,000. One Air Corps, basic ground crew, simulated infantry; we were called incidentally by a title, the Provisional Air Corps Infantry Regiment, which has never been acknowledged by the United States Army to this day. They refuse to designate us as infantry, and refuse to give us Combat Infantry badges to this day because we were designated Air Corps, even though we turned into infantry the first day. So, we’re very upset about that and have been since 1945. We naturally, did the brave thing and retreated as fast as we could back the way we came and got our asses out of the way. Only a handful of casualties, even though there were thousands of Japs. They didn’t know how few we were, they had no idea. And they heard all this noise and thought, my God it must be a massive force there, instead it was just innocent kids, backing away. We then were relieved by the finest trained infantry in the world, Filipinos. Filipino scouts rated the best in the world against anyone else, even the vaunted Nazis. They said as they came in behind us, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of them. And they took care of them.Robert Weisel:

How many of those–Daniel William Crowley:

They slaughtered all the Japs.Robert Weisel:

No, how many scouts were there?Daniel William Crowley:

We had no idea.Robert Weisel:

Oh.Daniel William Crowley:

To this day. But it was probably around a regimen. And they surrounded the Japs and simply pushed them off into the sea whence they came, only they weren’t living anymore. Now the jungle was de-neutered by them as they blasted their way through. We then took up the position of defense on the coast. Filipinos did us a due and went on to whatever affairs that they were going to save the Americans from disaster. We waited there for the next landing which came and while we were waiting, our armories got ahold of 50 caliber guns from our destroyed P-40 aircraft. And they managed to improvise manual cocking, cause they were electronically charged from the aircraft, and again, use some magic of creating waterpipe, or some kind of pipe into the, the – what would you call it?Robert Weisel:

The tripod?Daniel William Crowley:

The tripod, right I couldn’t think of the word. And they were lined up on the beach with these four 50-caliber air-cooled guns set to fire across the water at about three feet, as I recall. We were flanking them with our 30-caliber rifles on each side and here they came. They estimated they were about sixty large barges coming in, and they made such a noise that you couldn’t mistake them. They sounded like the famous Palmer engines from my childhood, they must have been one cylinder engines on the barges because they made the chug chugging sound of a single cylinder. And the Japs didn’t seem to worry about anyone defending the coast cause when they got close enough they started throwing the mortars at us. And we had been smart enough at this point to know enough to dig holes. So, we were all in spider holes and the mortars flew over our heads and exploded behind us, thank God. So when they got in close enough, the armories opened up with our 50 caliber air-cooled and just destroyed the barges. And the poor remaining Japs who weren’t drowned or shot by the first barrage of the 50s and lined up in the water were picked off by our spring field rifles at that point. A few got ashore and we actually captured a few. They did surrender, even though the Japs were supposed never to surrender. And they were delighted to find out we didn’t kill them. We even fed them from our meager rations. And getting back to the meager rations, from our first day, my description of having the Christmas dinner, the can of tomatoes, it got worse. The grand general staff of the Philippines had forgotten to get the food into Bataan in time, even though General MacArthur had designed the defensive plan while he was superintendent of the military academy at West Point. That was a carefully planned defensive maneuver to pull into the Japan because you couldn’t defend 7,000 islands with the small amount of defenders that we had and knowing that they were never going to send the proper amount of armaments there. Whenever the army or military command gave any indication of rearming the fill Philippines properly, the Jap would protest and the guns never got there, the proper defensive weaponry. We listened to their protests and acted accordingly. We had treaties with them after all. That’s what we’re having to do now, we want to have another nice treaty with the Russians, and no one pays attention to treaties of course. So, ten million tons of provisions made it to commander one just north of Bataan and that’s where it was captured by the Japanese. All the food that was supposed to supply the needs of all the military and all the civilian Filipinos who lived on Bataan. Giving the Navy time — this was the plan — to break through and relieve Bataan, because there was no Navy left at that point except one or two ships.Robert Weisel:

What food did you have?Daniel William Crowley:

Our first day of true rations prepared by our mess sergeant and mess corps was a mess kit about three-quarters filled with liquid rice — to make it go farther — and flavored with some kind of fish, canned meat or fish. Probably about one large can for 200+ men. The weight fell off our bodies so quickly that it wasn’t long before we had lost almost 30 or 40 percent of our known weight. We were riddled with dysentery, malaria, dingy fever and jungle-rot while living out in the open in the jungle. Our helmets, World War II style, were our pillows and wash-basins. We slept on the ground from December 24, til the end of Bataan, which was April 9 of ’42. Our truly great hero General, Edward King, who was the true defender of Bataan — even though MacArthur got all the credit after paying one visit for approximately an hour, to Bataan. The newspapers in the United States gave him total accolades because the propaganda sent by Washington, ‘the Hero of Bataan’ — Edward King was the hero of Bataan. He set up the positions, held them as long as possible and then made strategic retreats. He had the Filipino 155 artillery guns strategically sent, so that by February the Japs were almost totally destroyed by our defense. They suffered huge casualties. The battles of Bataan essentially faded away to just skirmishes from then on until the Japs resupplied and rebuilt the force, bringing their troops from Malaysia where the English had surrendered in weeks. We held out from December 24th to April 9th of ’42. Some experts in the world, military historians have stated, nay have in fact stated that our defense saved Australia, because if the Jap juggernaut had not been stopped in the Philippines, it would have flown south very quickly. And there was no defense in Australia to stop it, none whatsoever. They had overran all the English positions in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and most of Indonesia, which is, it was the possession of the Dutch at that time. Nothing would have stopped them and when Australia fell, nothing would have gotten through to take back the Pacific, because they would’ve had the greatest defensive platform imaginable and they had millions of highly trained military personnel to repel any attack on Australia. So we did it. We were told that we did it, and we think we did.Robert Weisel:

But let me ask you a question.Daniel William Crowley:

Yea.Robert Weisel:

Between the 24th of December ’41 until April 9th, ’42, you were under constant attack by the Japanese?Daniel William Crowley:

Land, sea and air. They commanded the sea and the air. If anything moved on the ground it was bombed or strafed. The slightest movement. They were floating over the jungle constantly. We had no anti-aircraft. If they spotted a blue barracks bag, that was before they woke up and dyed them — but a blue bag was very easily spotted from the air. We had one 50-caliber water cooler from a Naval small tugboat, or whatever it was, a small Naval ship. And we recovered it and mounted it on the highest point where our defense was and a kid who never had fired one before in his life when the Jap observer came over and he shot him out of the sky with his 50-caliber water cooler. That was the mightiest anti-aircraft barrage in history. He had to get it out of there because it would have been destroyed immediately, in fact it probably was, I don’t recall. But that was our air defense. We didn’t dare shoot back with our rifles, or our World War I, water-cooled 30-calibers, because that would have brought an immediate response. We were just hunted down — rabbits in the jungle as far as the Japs were concerned — but we had slaughtered them enough, and they were so weakened by the loss of personnel to the Filipino artillery and the 30-caliber rifles and machine guns that they had to stop. They had no more offensive capability, except for skirmishes. They had the air constantly, they had the sea, but there was almost a phony war until they rebuilt. And when they rebuilt, that final week of the defense of Bataan and launched their final attack, it was overwhelming. And it was against starved skeletons who had no energy left, even though MacArthur had ordered the commanders in the Philippines, on Bataan, to attack, attack, attack! Our commanding officers knew a little better. With what? We could hardly walk. We were nothing but skeletons and raging fever was rampant throughout the defense. The men in the so-called hospitals were lying on the ground and in cots. And I have a great photograph from Life, how the Bataan wounded lived in pain. It’s in that bundle I’m going to give you. One of the worst killers of those poor bastards in the hospitals was gangrene, something that had been almost passé in wartime, we’d learned how to combat it. Civil war, gangrene took most of the casualties – was responsible for most of the deaths. Anyway…Robert Weisel:

You had no doctors?Daniel William Crowley:

We had doctors. They had nothing. They improvised. They were mostly Navy doctors and they did their damnedest. They would wrap the legs covered with rot in filthy bandages and use maggots to hopefully clean up the wounds, to save the legs. So that was – the medicine that they were performing.Robert Weisel:

Of all the men of the unit that started in the 24th of December until April 9th, approximately how many were casualties?Daniel William Crowley:

Of my organization?Robert Weisel:

Yes.Daniel William Crowley:

Just the 17th Pursuit? That was the name of my organization. I have no idea. We were so scattered in the jungle you were lucky to know two or three guys within shouting distance. We had one character from Maine, stationed on a trail with an air-cooled 30-caliber and a strategic location, and you could hear him hollering when he fired his gun – this is why we’re really killing the Japs. He was taking such great delight, he was screaming at the top of his lungs and you could hear his gun going. He lived to get home to Maine.Robert Weisel:

What – do you know his name?Daniel William Crowley:

I don’t remember. Oh, it was either DeCato or DeLile, DePessy, there were more Ds in our organization, New England boys. Incidentally that ship that left January 2nd from Brooklyn was full. New England, New York and then we picked up these South Carolinians and packed it still full, so we stayed out on deck most of the voyage, all the way to San Francisco. And of that ship, today, I would guess there are maybe five or six alive of that full ship. Because in total, there are rumored to be only 50ish of us alive out of the 37,000 who were surrendered to the Japanese. Americans. Roughly 37,000 in the entire Philippines were surrendered by Wainwright. General Wainwright was the final commander after MacArthur left. Johnathan, treated like dirt by MacArthur. His final order to Wainwright was, Charge! With what? Where did we leave off?Robert Weisel:

Well we left off at the 9th of April.Daniel William Crowley:

Oh, here we go now. We were ordered to report to the tip of Bataan, the place called Marvelius Village.Robert Weisel:

M-a-r-v-e…?Daniel William Crowley:

Marvelius. Do it phonetically. M-a-r-v-e-l-i-u-s, I think. Mervelious. That’s where we were supposed to line up and ready for the Japs to take us under control. The orders came to destroy your weapons, your personal weapons; your rifle, your pistol, and report there. So Bataan was chaos that day. All the ammunition dumps of artillery shells that were left because we had no more guns to use the artillery shells, but we had a large store of shells and they blew them all up. And then there was a slight earthquake simultaneous with the fall of Bataan. There was was actually a real earthquake, so the sound of the bombs being blown up, and the feeling of the earthquake was totally terrifying, should I say. And we’re straggling down, if you can picture this scene, through the jungle, loose groups straggling down to report for the fate of being a prisoner. What I got to the tip, a few of us decided we had no interest in becoming prisoners. Told it was absolutely mandatory. So we went out on a tip of land that stuck into Manila Bay, and we go to the very tip of it, it was all rocks sort of a breakwater. And we hid among the stones until dark. And in the meantime, a ship was burning in Manila Bay, loaded with bombs that they had tried to get out before the Japs landed in the Philippines, to get it to Australia. There were 4,000 tons of bombs on that ship, and the Japs set it on fire because they couldn’t get it out of the harbor. Or Manila Bay. The Japs had it blockaded totally. So they turned back and anchored, and the Japs set it on fire. And a young, American officer who was supposed to be an authority, a second lieutenant, announced to us that, “Don’t worry. Fire will not ignite bombs.” So, we had the crew of that ship with us and they had pulled their lifeboats up onto the breakwater and covered them with camouflage as much as possible. Ba-boom. The ship exploded. It was forty percent of the force of a Hiroshima bomb, 4,000 tons. Hiroshima bomb was about 10,000 tons. The resulting firestorm ignited the whole shore of Manila Bay or Marvelius Harbor. Anyway, not the whole bay. A miniature tsunami poured over our point, caused by this enormous explosion. We were huddled under our World War I pancake helmets and it rained down on us, fragments of the ship, fiery fragments, the sky was just black and red from the residue of the explosion. And actually you could hear the fragments popping on your helmet so you huddled under it the best you could. When it became dark, the crew of that ship put the lifeboats in the water, we loaded up. I was hanging on the sides. They were up to the gunnels, as they say as we made our way across to Corregidor, the fortress of the pacific. That’s where the Philippines government had retreated to, and MacArthur had retreated to. They were all there. Anything that moved in the water before dark was strafed. So we had to wait ‘til dark. And the water was covered. Several hundred of us were making it. Hanging on to lifeboats, swimming, holding on to debris of one kind or another. And when we hit the shore, the rocky shore of Corregidor, we were challenged by a Marine Corps 4th Regiment Guard. Who goes there? I think he made the crack, you’re in the Marine Corps now. So we were aside the various Marine Corps companies throughout the island, and mine was under Captain Shefner, who was known as Shifty ?Shefner? from his days as an All American football player. We were immediately facing where we had come, Bataan. And I was again assigned to a machine gun, again, only this time it was a modern World War I water-cooled Marine Corps infantry weapon, not the air-cooled English model I’d had. We would go down to the rocks each morning, we’d lower ourselves on a rope, down this steep cliff to man the gun. And before dawn we would go back up because they would shell when daylight occurred. Shortly after dawn the shelling would start. The shelling or Corregidor was so massive that Corregidor, before it started was a jungle-covered island with python up to 30-odd feet found on it. Bring them back a lot, Frank Buck used to capture them there. This thick, jungle covered island was reduced to a site like a World War I battlefield. All the vegetation was gone. The most immense artillery bombardment per foot, I guess, in history. The Japs had brought down to the tip of Bataan, large numbers of 240-millimeter guns and huge numbers of 105s and they were firing, point blank, at us. Our guns had all been destroyed. One huge, coast artillery gun that was just behind us, in the hill behind where our defensive position was located was hit so many times, the Japanese 240s finally penetrated through this huge, reinforced concrete covering of the magazine. The gun had already been destroyed, because it was out in the open. All these huge coast artillery guns on crate were in the open. Magnificent, very smart defense. It was a Spanish-American, World War I-type defense. The Japs would just plug the shells in steadily, one after another, many dozen rounds after another until they totally destroyed each of the big guns, systematically. When that magazine went up, the entire island seemed to rise up several feet in the air, and it rained us with debris. We were below it, and one of our guys was buried alive. And a Marine Corps, a regular Marine, a real Marine from the 4th Regiment dug him out. They both survived, and the guy that was buried alive was on the police force of Pawtucket, Rhode Island recently – was it Pawtucket or Woodsocket? Anyway, just died a couple of years ago, and his liberator who dug him out died about ten years ago. Great story.Robert Weisel:

Yea.Daniel William Crowley:

May the 6th came, and the Japs got tanks ashore. We destroyed many of their landing craft, and thousands of Japs were killed in the defense – those final thirty days. But actually the final day, when they were making their landing, and it was the antiaircraft men from New Mexico who had their guns leveled and fired them on a flat trajectory, point blank at the Jap landings. So the shrapnel was exploding over their heads. The rumor was 15,000 Japs died in the landing. I know the bodies were in enormous numbers, and that was our big job after the surrender; to burn the bodies. We piled them up in huge piles.Robert Weisel:

This was required by the Japanese?Daniel William Crowley:

Oh yes. That was our first major slave labor performance, burning the Jap bodies. And there were a lot of them. They were angry. They very angry, because we had put up this defense of Bataan which caused them to lose tremendous face in Tokyo. And then _____ again. The thirty days it took for them to take it, and the number of casualties made them very angry. So they forced the defenders of Corregidor, approximately 10 to 12,000 into this couple of acre area, which was a truck depo covered with concrete and it had a couple of large garages. And it was totally destroyed from the shelling, all the structures. But here were 10 or 12,000 of us, packed into this thing a couple of acres of concrete on the edge of the water. So you couldn’t go anywhere in the water. And you couldn’t go anywhere on the land, because they set up a perimeter of machine guns to keep you pinned in. And there was no food issued. There was one half-inch water pipe for 10 or 12,000 men. The sanitation facilities were pits we dug and if you could picture 10 or 12,000 people with dysentery, totally consumed with dysentery and malaria, squatting around these open pits. Some fell in, they slid backwards into it, there was no way of saving them. They just disappeared. If you went in the water to wash yourself off, because defecation was everywhere coming around, you had to push it aside with your arms because the surface of the water was covered with it. So that we endured for about two or three weeks, I’ve forgotten exactly. But it wasn’t very pleasant, and I almost died from yellow jaundice. I didn’t know what it was, but one of the guys from Maine saved my life, and his named was Hinkley, from Hinkley, Maine. He was a member of our squadron. He went outside the perimeter where the Japs had the men piling up food from the tunnels on Corregidor, where the food was stored for the officer staff and the hospital inmates. And there was quite a bit of food still stored there. They had no idea how long they were going to have to hold on, so they were on a strict ration, but it was far better than the ration we had on Bataan. So he actually stole a box of sugar from this food pile and made me eat the whole box. He had known that sugar, somehow, would fight against the jaundice in the bloodstream, and it saved me. It cleared me up, which was an amazing thing. Yea. So I went to look up his family one day in Maine, I couldn’t find anybody – he had died a horrible death in one of these slave camps at Nichols Field, where they pumped him full of water and then jumped on him. They were the Jap Marines, the Japanese Naval Landing Force, they were called. They were the Japanese Marines. They’re the most miserable, murderous bastards in history. Totally merciless. So here we go now, they’re going to evacuate us from the island, and we had to walk out in the water and climb aboard these small boats that they brought. I don’t know what they were but – we had to climb up out of the water and it was up to our necks, and then after the boats were packed, it would bring us into the shore of Manila, along the main boulevard, which was called Dewey Boulevard after the famous admiral who sank the Spanish fleet. We were told to jump over the side in water up to our necks, some areas even deeper. And walk up to Dewey Boulevard. It was right along the coastline. And as we were lined up there, the trucks of Japanese officers came on horseback with drawn swords, and herded us through the throngs of Filipinos who lined the streets to watch the crushed Americans go by. It was all staged by the Japs. They had their journalists filming it and the Jap officers with drawn swords would whack us as they went by. This was quite a sight, a propaganda film being made for the benefit of the people in Japan to show the crushed – and all the peoples of southeast Asia. Remember this was called the greater far east Asia coprosperities fear. That was the propaganda of the Japs, we’re going to liberate you from the white man, the oppressors, and we will show you paradise under our reign. They were the worst despots in the history of the world. Far worse than any western occupier. So, we marched through the streets of Manila to show the Filipinos the crushed white man and the rest of the world of Asia. And eventually we got to a rail hedge. And they packed us into metal, ancient, small rail cars, such as the type used on the narrow gauge rails in Europe, the 40 and eighth tour. Then they slammed the doors closed, and this merciless tropical sun. So here we were, packed together in these cars so you couldn’t move. You were literally forced to stand straight and the defecation and urine just flowing down on the floor — if you can picture, in total darkness — and the car started to roll and we came to one spot where they stopped to allow us to perform, and if you urinated before permission was given, they would attack with the bayonet to set an example. Here were these subhuman creatures, covered with defecation, stumbling off the car and after one stop there wasn’t another until we got to the point where we were thrown out to march to the prison camp at Cabanatuan. This was slightly better a destination than the one the Bataan remaining forcers who had surrendered were brought to after the infamous death march on Bataan. That was simply the evacuation of Bataan, it was given the name death march by journalists in Australia when ______ my commander, and nine other guys broke out of a Jap camp in one of the southern islands, and under a subterfuge pretending they were going to work with their tools over their shoulder. They saluted the Jap guards as they marched out from where they were kept to sleep and got permission to go – shigoto, that’s work. And the Jap guard would say “Shigoto. _____” and off they’d go, and they’d never stop. They went down through an impenetrable jungle, and the all broke up, ten of them, and they finally reached the same destination it was a miracle. They killed a few Jap guards on the way. And they appeared at a Filipino which, by the grace of God, had no sympathizers of the Japs, it was so isolated. They loved Americans. And they had a radio. And they radioed Australia.Robert Weisel:

Okay.Daniel William Crowley:

And getting to a Filipino village, and the Filipinos had a radio and they called Australia, or they Morse coded Australia. And a submarine was dispatched, it picked up these ten guys, they made it to Australia. They were interviewed, and as a result of the interview, a journalist coined the title of the experience they had been through the “Bataan Death March,” an all-encompassing term to describe not just that evacuation in Bataan, but their time in the prison camps up to that point. Now this was ’43, two years from the start of the War for the United States, in the Philippines.Robert Weisel:

Oh, so let me make sure that I have this right. Shifty escaped in ’43.Daniel William Crowley:

’43 with the nine other fellas.Robert Weisel:

Okay.Daniel William Crowley:

That was 1943. This was the first word that the folks at home finally got to know we were alive. A bamboo curtain had dropped over the Pacific, and the Japs weren’t telling whether we were alive. They just simply knew we were incarcerated, in their power, but no one knew whether we had survived until those interviews in Australia. And the newspapers throughout the United States then knew the story and described the murderous reign of the Japanese in bold headlines.Robert Weisel:

You don’t know the months that that happened do you?Daniel William Crowley:

No, I don’t. But it was the first time Washington and the people of this country knew that we were alive.Robert Weisel:

So you had had no contact with the outside world?Daniel William Crowley:

Oh God no. No. Nope. So, where are we now? We’re _____ because the folks evacuated from Bataan by the Japs so they could bring in their huge artillery, and all the rest of their forces to attack Corregidor, on the way down they were smashing the heads of the fellows walking by on the so-called death march just for the sport of it. They’d hold 2x4s out the trucks, whacking them as they went by. And they killed about 10,000 Filipinos and about 3,000 Americans on that March. But the overwhelming number of dead were the Filipinos. They got to the camp called, “?O’Donnel?,” which had been a Filipino National Guard training camp, such as the training they got, which wasn’t much. And the Japs packed 100,000 Filipinos and Americans into that place, and 26,000 died in six weeks of dysentery, malaria and starvation. The dogs ate the bodies at night. They would pop to the surface. The Jap commander told the American commander who begged for mercy, begged for medicine, for food, for water, “I want you all to die.” The son of a bitch was only persuaded to close that camp and allow them out when his own men started to die from the disease that was spreading rapidly, because the flies would coat the faces of the seriously ill, ____ on the faces. They’d already been feasting on open sores and defecation and they were in the eyes and the mouths, and so on. And at night – the burial there grew to 5 or 600 a day at the worst point. Before it slowed down gradually. We were packed into Cabanatuan where 3,000 Americans died also, same kind of conditions. This was almost all Americans at Cabanatuan. I forget how many West Point – oh, it was almost 150 West Point officers, graduates of West Point died at Cabanatuan, such a waste; murdered, period. They were all murdered. When I held a ceremony at the Washington monument, that incidentally was where the rail head was located where all that food was stored that was supposed to be shipped into Bataan to prepare for the defense of Bataan until the US Navy could break through. But the Japanese – ooh, I called them Japanese – captured all of that food. Our idiot high-ranking officers in command blew it, as I’ve described previously. I’m sorry fellas, you’re all gone I’m sure by now. But you blended, badly. We actually had our first major slave labor operation after the burning to the Jap bodies on Corregidor at Cabanatuan where we were forced to raise food for the Japs. Sweet potatoes. The vines were the only nourishing food we got that had any vitamins in them, I guess. But you couldn’t shear them. Again, they gave us an infinitesimal ration of rice filled with little white worms and stones and debris of all kinds. And for soup we boiled these vines, the sweet potato vines, and you could chew it for a week and you still couldn’t chew it down to where you could swallow it, but I guess we got something out of it. I remember the soup was a dark green anyway. They gave us some vitamins without even thinking of what they were doing. So anyway, there the sanitation, again, was a horror. The ground was covered with it. Until an improvisation was created with the permission the Japs – they were terrified of the disease. The flies were swarming by the billions. The blue bottles. And they issued some lumber. And we had a couple of clever guys who designed a mass defecation station out of lumber. They put holes in it, in a proper outhouse fashion and they had a sloping troth under it, and a 50 gallon drum at one end of the troth. So here you’d see God-knows how many at once, I’m sure scores, pooping all at once and then a fellow was out at the 50 gallon drum and he’d tip it and flush it down into a ditch, where it would flow out of the camp. And this latrine ditch became the favorite destination of the rats. So we supplemented our diet by eating the rats. We would form little groups in camp, and if you were the superhero who managed to kill a rat, you were a leader sort of. So you and your group would boil up that rat in a can, if you could find a can. But the amazing thing was the ability to improvise. Anything to survive. So we cleaned all the rats out. There were dogs in the beginning wandering through, wild dogs. They were all gone. Actual cats I believe, too. So anything that moved was gone and our poop conditions improved to the point that the death rate slowed down dramatically, absolutely dramatically. So at this point they started to send off men to Japan to work at the home islands. And one of the first shiploads went off in a ship called the Oreoko Maru. Oh pardon me, that wasn’t one of the first. Hold it there, I want to get to that one. Shipload after shipload went off and we called them the death ships or the hell ships and I’ll just skip briefly over it, because it’s a story all itself. Almost 6,000 Americans died in the hulls of those hell ships. They lie at the bottom of the Pacific. Among the last of the hell ships to leave Manila — it was rather late in ’44, when they were getting desperate for more labor in Japan and the Americans had already started to bomb the Philippines so who were the last to go in the hell ship? We were down to the officers who hadn’t been sent out. It was the enlisted men that the American higher command gave the Japs on all the previous hell ships. Finally there was no one left but officers. So 1700 officers went out on the Oryoku Maru from Manila and then rounded the point to Alungapu(ph) where the big Marine naval base was located, you know about that, near Clark Field. And it came around, pardon me, it barely got around the point from Manila bay when it was hit first by American plains and submarines. When it finally got in close to land, at Alungapu(ph), the survivors on it went over the sides and the Japs were machine-gunning them in the water. Those that survived finally were packed into a tennis court at the old American base, in the blazing sun coated with oil, salt-water, and you could imagine what it was like. We were lying on concrete. So God knows, that story, in itself was a horror tale. And from there they were transported by truck to another port and went off on another ship which was sunk. The final ship, the three man, three ship, we called it the safari to Japan. The final ship landed in Japan, one of the southern ports, and there were 300 who managed to survive out of the 1700. And as they came through this village, the inhabitants, who were supposed to cheer the Japanese army for their marvelous superiority, were crying. And one of our guys wrote a wonderful book about that. Forgive us our trespasses. He wound up a doctor. Got home, went to med school in France, unbelievable. One of his relatives that lives there brought him over. Anyway.Robert Weisel:

What was a typical day like?Daniel William Crowley:

Typical day? There was no typical day. (Laughter) at Cabanatuan it was farming, naked. Loincloth, that’s all you had for clothing. The ground was brutally hard on your feet, it was like walking on sharp stones. So after that farming experience, for the Japs at Cabanatuan, and going off in a slave ship, from Manila, I was one of the lucky ones. I got on one of the early slave ships. And I’m almost sure it was around March of ’44 when mine left. I can’t remember the name but I call it for laughs, the Benjo Maru. Because they were all Maru’s and Benjo was the defecation place, so I called it the ?Benjo? Maru. They were all ships that they confiscated when they marched south and took over all of southeast Asia. Anyway, when we landed in Japan, we were on a northern port. We came down the gangplank and they flanked us with the largest physical specimens they had. They must has been fellas from the northern island, ?Okidu?, I believe, because they were much larger than the ordinary Japanese. At that time, they seemed to be head and shoulders over them. And it was to impress us with their superiority and they were staging – filming another propaganda film as we came off and the cameras were rolling. So it was all staged and we were assigned to a place called, Hitachi. That was the town of the mighty Hitachi Corporation on the coast. Hitachi is the Japanese General Electric, you know, much larger than General Electric today, with our help. They had mines behind the factory city, which is there, Hitachi City on the coast, and they had copper mines in the hills behind it. So that’s where I started copper-mining deep rock. Way down. Very short time there and then they sent me and a bunch of fellas on to a place called Ashio, run by the Furukawa Corporation, another copper mine way into the Jap alps. And there were approximately 5- or 600 Americans there. You wanted to know about my daily experience, well there it was again, a story in itself. Before dawn the Jap guards would come through the wooden shacks that we were packed into on three wooden platforms and you were given approximately, I’d say a foot, about a foot and a half space for each body. Shoulder to shoulder. Looked exactly the same as the inmates at Aushwitz, on the platforms. That was our sleeping arrangement, on bamboo. And the bedbugs were in the millions, if not billions. Bedbugs, lice and fleas. So you’d wake up in the morning covered in blood from crushing them. And they’d whack you on the feet. This was before dawn, and you were to roll out and ?shigoto?, that was work, work. The only heat in the barracks, the winter of ’44 were lumps of charcoal. They would issue two or three lumps to each barracks so you’d see a glow in the dark. It was no actual heat, the bodies – it was like a cowbind – kept each other relatively warm. So we march – fast forward into the winter, we’d march through the snow up to your waist, waist-deep, barefooted with cotton – they issued us cotton uniforms, top and bottom. And we marched to the mine shaft in the village and they packed us into a bucket which held over twenty of us. Packed in with a small barricade which came up to approximately your waist. And the shaft was raw rock with water running down it constantly, and the bucket had a spring on top, a massive spring with a rusty cable attached to it. And the Jap running the steam wench would, when you were packed in to full capacity, open the wench line and dropped the cables as fast as it would go, til you hit about 1900 feet and then he’d hit the brake and bounce you. And he did that every morning, this is for laughs, he got a big charge out of it. So we were waiting every morning for that cable to snap, to go the rest of the way down the shaft. We got to the bottom, we were in tunnels that were built in the 16th century. A Jap baron had opened the mine in 1580-something, as I recall. The mine at Ashio. Closed up before the war because it was worked out, but they had cheap labor so they opened it again to scratch any copper they could get out of it. Anyway, it was like the famous Dante’s inferno down there, in total blackness and very, very low height, designed for the Japanese of the 16th century who averaged around four and a half feet, I would think. The tunnels weren’t that much higher. So we were walking bent over through them. We were, again, dressed in those cotton uniforms and barefooted, but it was warmer down there. It would average 50-odd degrees. And we performed all sorts of bloody, brutal manual labor with primitive tools, some that looked like they came out of the prehistoric era. And I won two or three of the greatest jobs. One was assisting the Jap powder monkey. And Americans would actually, these were fellas from the deep South, most of them, volunteer to run drills, six-foot-long drillbits. And they would drill the holes in the head of the face of the rock, and this Jap powdermonkey would pack the dynamite in with wires. So we’d wire them all together, and he’d fill up each hole with as many sticks as he could, al wired together, and filled all the holes in to one main twisting fuse. And he would light that with his cigarette. When he sucked down the cigarette, when it glowed red enough, he would touch it to the fuse and I would be squatting next to him because I couldn’t move until he said so. And he would wait until the fuse was burning beautifully before giving me permission to get the hell out of there. And we would walk slowly down the main tunnel, and into a lateral and squat. And by the time we squatted, the explosion went off. He had it timed perfectly. The blast would come by you. This went on and on and on, over and over.Robert Weisel:

So you did this seven days a week?Daniel William Crowley:

Oh yea. There was no Cantine or PX. Then I had a great detail, another one hauling shoring timbers on my back up hundred-foot is shafts between levels. So they would attach this roughly, probably five and a half, six foot shoring timber about six inches thick on my back with ropes. And I had to climb this steep wooden ladder in this narrow, narrow shaft up to the next level. And when the shoring timber popped above that level, the Jap up there was supposed to grab it and help pull me out with the timber. But he would deliberately let me hang there, of course. That was another sport. And many of the rungs on this ladder would be gone, so you’d reach for a step and it wouldn’t be there. Then you had illumination, you had a carbide lamp around your neck. Carbide is the chunks of stone and the water would drip from the top and the gas would be lit, that would be the illumination. You’d have it hooked to your uniform. That was your only source of illumination and you prayed you didn’t drop it going up, because then you’d be in total darkness two thousand feet below the surface. So I felt for those miners in South America. And finally, finally, the Spring came. We knew that we wouldn’t see another winter.Robert Weisel:

This is Spring of 1945?Daniel William Crowley:

Right. And as the days grew warmer, the mice grew stronger. The ration got smaller. They would feed us whatever grade they could find in warehouses filled with dirt, worms, so on. Sometimes it would be pure horse corn. Sometimes we actually got soybeans, which was a miracle. There was about two days we got soybeans. But again, you couldn’t digest them, raw soybeans, boiled but they still were indigestible because our bodies weren’t used to it. Too much protein. So that would cause more diarrhea and so on. And once we were issued sharks intestines filled with creatures, of course and I got that detail. Cleaning out the shark’s intestines in freezing water, I remember this, this crap that we cleaned out of them. And another time we were issued old horse bones. And our cooks had these huge iron pots, so they could cook anything. So I remember they boiled the horses bones for a long time to get whatever possible good was in them and then when they finished boiling them, for God knows how long, they would crack the bones to get the marrow out and boil them some more. And the skulls, of course. So, these were little incidents you always remember.Robert Weisel:

Let me ask you a question here. As the war drew to a close, did you have any indication that things were changing, other than that the food was worse?Daniel William Crowley:

Very good question. American aircraft started flying over. B29s, and the Japs would yell, “____ Boku(ph)? Be didguku(ph)?” And they were terrified, their faces turned white. They’d heard what the B17s were doing. Never mind atomic bombs, the fire range was fantastic. We killed far more in the fire range than the atomic bombs killed. Children don’t know about that, because all they’re told is atomic bombs are bad, atomic energy is bad. It’s the only thing that’s going to save us, energy-wise, is atomic energy. But anyway, this, the panic among the Japs you could smell it. And we started breathing, slightly, a slight sign that we may live. This, possibly we may live. So finally it because that great day, August 14th and we got the word to the Jap commander from Tokyo, “Give them the day off, because the Emporer is going to speak.” And we were huddled around the Japanese commander’s headquarters in the camp and the cook they’d had was a Chinese fellow with a wooden leg who had been on an English freighter and he was the only survivor, a big fat fella. Sheng Li was his name, from Shi Want Tao. And he had family also in Shanghai and Tsing Tao, _____ Tsing Tao and _____. And he was my buddy. When I had a chance to talk to this Chinese guy he enjoyed talking with me, and he’d say, “Crowleson, you full of bullshit.” That was his favorite expression. And he grew fatter and fatter and fatter, he ate all the Japs’ food. He’d boil a can full of rice for the Jap officers, but he ate most of it. And he’d regale me with tales of his family, see. So we heard this strange sound, the Emporer speak. And Tsing Tao – Chen Li came running out of the headquarters yelling, when he saw me, “Crowleson, war over. Emporer speak.”Robert Weisel:

Go ahead.Daniel William Crowley:

So here we were now, stuck up there in the Jap alps, didn’t know where the hell we were and our interpreter, the Japanese interpreter was an ex-valet of the American Ambassador Drew. And he spoke perfect English, of course. And he warned us, do not leave the camp, these bad men will kill you. And all the nasty guards were pulled out and young kids who looked like Boy Scouts were sent in. So we certainly didn’t feel any animosity to them, and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing anyway. And the American planes started bombing us with food then. The B29s were dropping improvised platforms with shuts on them that didn’t slow them down, and when the platforms would hit the ground they would just splash all over the hillside outside our camp. Many of the camps were, the planeloads of food on these improvised wooden platforms (phone rings) would kill American prisoners. Some lost legs when they were hit with these things, but they had to get us food in a hurry. And I’ll never forget, we’d picked up all of these various canned goods that we could, and poured them into our cooking pots and made one massive stew. And we had a lot of chocolate, so we just stuffed ourselves. For weeks we stayed there from August 14th to roughly September 4th, I believe it was. When a train came up from Yokohama with one Jap engineer running the train, no Americans. And he pulled into the station at the mining town, and we loaded up the train and headed for Yokohama. And all the way down we were throwing candy to the children who seemed to appear out of nowhere at every station, they knew we were coming and we showered them with candy.Robert Weisel:

So you went to Yokohama, then you ______ ships?Daniel William Crowley:

Yokohama rushed us up to that Atsugi Airport after being deloused, and interviewed and unfortunately, we had put on so much weight in a hurry in these three weeks from this rich American food, that we just ballooned up with this fast fat, so when the Americans interviewed us they said, “Well you look like you were treated pretty damn well.” So I remember, one fellow I knew, who they called a damn liar when he told them what they were fed. They actually were nasty brutal to them. They said, “You’re a damned liar. No one could look like you.” Yea. Ignorance. We were rushed up to Atsugi airport, that was the main Japanese airfield, and I believe it’s still in operation, isn’t it Atsugi and that was because MacArthur wanted to get us out of Japan in a hurry before we performed some nasty act towards Japanese people. So they were flying us out in C54s that hadn’t been serviced in God knows how long, the crew chief on the one I was on told me, “We’re so far ahead of any servicing or maintenance, I hope we make it.” We lost two engines on the way to Okinawa. I remember those two engines feathering well, I’ll never forget the sound. And I remember asking him, most of the guys were asleep and I said, “Do you think we’ll make it?” And he said, “I sure as hell hope so.” But the C54 with a full load flew on with two engines. And when we landed in Okinawa, the runway had CDs lining it to greet us and they didn’t have any cigarettes. We had this huge supply now of Red Cross cigarettes, so we’re giving them all to the CDs. How about that? Then we flew on to Manila. Manila, again it was a tent city for weeks. If you wanted a beer, you could draw in advance on your backpay. So you could buy a bottle of very expensive Filipino beer, outrageously priced. We went into town once, in Manila to a restaurant that had been in business pre-war called Tom’s Dixie Kitchen. Tom was a Spanish-American War veteran, and here he was cranked up again. Didn’t take him long to get going and he was serving chicken which was nothing but bones, of course, and his customers were primarily officers because they had the money. And he was charging, I’ll never forget it, $35 for that scrawny chicken. And I know that two or three guys I was with were looked down on by the officers in the room, in the dining room; how dare you be here among you betters? That was their attitude. It never changes.

Gregory J. Slavonic, who is performing the duties of the Navy undersecretary, will present Crowley with an honorary Combat Infantryman Badge in recognition