WWII’s Most Decorated Soldier Was a Teenager: The Audie Murphy Story

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Most of us know that on December 7th, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. However, let’s know that hours later, on December 8th, they also invaded the Philippines, a U.S. territory at the time. One of those soldiers in the Philippines was the late Dr. Lester Tenney. Here’s Dr. Tenney at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans telling his story. We’d like to thank the museum for graciously allowing us to use this audio.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: Let’s get into the story.

00:00:56
Speaker 3: And can me give us some information. The first tank battle of World War II was on December 23rd at the city of Ago, up at Lingayen Gulf. General Wainwright asked for a company of tanks to meet the Japanese. When we got up to our bivouac area, our post ordnance brought us enough gasoline for five tanks, and so five tanks went into battle instead of a company of tanks. I know what I’m talking about. I was in one of the five tanks. Let me tell you them about tanks. For those of you who are not familiar with tanks. You can put that tank out of commission with one shell. One shell. All you have to do is hit the track. Ben Morin was the lieutenant in charge of our lead tank. The lead tank was hit right away. Once it was hit in the turret. The second shell hit a track. The tank went to the right, ended up in a rice paddy. The four men in that tank were captured that day. The second tank was hit. A shell went through the tank and took the bow gunner’s head right off and went out the back. Two tanks out of five put out of commission in three minutes. Our tanks had to turn around and head back towards Bataan. I will say that Ben Moran made the comment many minutes later that if he ever got out of that thing alive, he was going to devote his life to God. Ben Moran became a Jesuit priest. So, tanks in the Philippines was not too bright. We ended up with the most unusual army. We had an air force without airplanes, a navy without ships, and soldiers without shoes. We had the old doughboy helmets. We were using Springfield rifles manufactured in 1917, ammunition manufactured in 1915, 1916, and 1917. When we were firing our guns, we were hoping that one out of every four bullets would explode. That was the kind of war we had to fight at that time. So it was a disaster for us, really. And yet he told the fighters on Bataan and Corregidor that support was coming. It was not coming. I have a note here from the War Department. I think the end remark sort of tells the whole story. The end remark was that the relief of the Philippines will not be undertaken because it is impossible. Did you hear that? The War Department decided that it was impossible to help us. Let me tell you what General MacArthur had to say. “This is an instruction to all commanders: inform your troops that supplies and ammunition are on their way. Airplanes are coming in. Foot soldiers will be here soon.” This man lied to us when he knew different, and so we fought the best we could, and Corregidor held out. That was a thorn in their side, and they had to solve that problem. The Japanese had a flotilla of about 30,000 troops, tanks, flamethrowers, everything, on their way to Australia. But the Japanese had to take their flotilla, turn it around, and come into Bataan. They came in on April 3rd, the First Emperor’s birthday, and that’s when the push started. And it was a disaster. The Japanese were absolutely stepping over their own dead bodies because they had to move forward and forward and forward. Now, ladies and gentlemen, think for a moment. We were on a peninsula, three sides of water. Where were we going to go? We had nothing left. By the 8th of April, everybody on Bataan was already down at the water’s edge. At the water’s edge, and on April 8th, General Wainwright on Corregidor, General King on Bataan, received a message from Douglas MacArthur. The message said, “This garrison will not capitulate. If all else failed, you will charge the enemy.” General King said, “I cannot do that. If I do not surrender my forces tomorrow morning, Bataan will be known and around the world as the first worst disaster in the history of mankind. I can’t do that to my troops. I have to give some of them a chance to live.”

00:06:14
Speaker 2: And so.

00:06:16
Speaker 3: General King gave instructions: on the morning of April 9th, all forces on Bataan are to lay down their arms and surrender to the Japanese soldiers in a sad day. Most people don’t understand this. Let me tell you: the worst military defeat the United States ever had on Bataan. On April 9th, Bataan, 70,000 people were forced to surrender. 70,000 people. And yet when we talk about Bataan, most people don’t know what we’re talking about. I gave a program some years ago, and one woman came up to me. At the very end, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad I came.” She said, “When I heard it was going to be talking about baton twirling, I really wasn’t interested at all. Baton twirling!” That’s what somebody knew about Bataan.

00:07:17
Speaker 1: We’ll continue with Lester Tenney’s story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to our email OAS@OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OAS@OurAmericanStories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too. And we return to Our American Stories and with the late Dr. Lester Tenney’s story. Tenney is the author of My Hitch in Hell, The Bataan Death March. When we last left off, Tenney was telling us about the largest surrender of troops in U.S. history to the Japanese. Most of these men would be forced into the Death March, to the first prison camp they’d be held in. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Dr. Lester Tenney.

00:08:40
Speaker 3: So the war ended for us on April 9th. You have to understand that General King was doing things in violation of the military code. He was not following orders from his commander. The manager said, “You will not capitulate; you will charge the enemy.” He capitulated. He did exactly what you were not supposed to do. He could have in court martial. Let me share with you. Every officer was given a promotion, one rank promotion—every officer except General King. You know, they asked me if I wanted to have some pictures up on the screen. I have a lot of pictures, but there’s no way that a picture could show you the anxiety, the frustration, the sadness of what went on in Bataan. No pictures, and so I didn’t bring any for that reason. And so that’s a little bit of the story leading up to the Bataan Death March. I don’t know why we call it a march. I really don’t. It wasn’t a march. These were 12,000 sick men that were forced by the Japanese to walk to the first prison camp. It was called a death march, not just because of how many died, although out of the 12,000 Americans that were captured on Bataan at the end of the war, only 1,700 came home. Think about that: 12,000 to 1,700. But that’s not why it was called the Bataan Death March. It was called a Bataan Death March because of the way they died. If you stopped, you died. If you had a malaria attack, you died. If you just couldn’t take another walk, another step, you died. If you had a defuicate, you died. No food, no water. But they gave us nothing. We were called lower than dogs. We were called cowards because we surrendered, and that was part of the reason why we were fed it so poorly, because their philosophy was: if you surrendered, you were lower than a dog, because they would not surrender. They would rather die for the emperor than surrender. My nose was broken on the death march two or three times. My teeth were all knocked out, thanks to the Veterans Administration. I have something to chew now, the VA. Thank you, Mister VA. I had my nose broken, my teeth knocked out, my head split open. The fourth day on the march, a Japanese officer was coming by on horseback, swinging his samurai sword, trying to see what kind of heads he could cut off. He missed my neck, but he slipped me down the back with his samurai sword. My friends, they carried me. They brought up a medic from the rear end who brought me up, sewed me up with needle and thread. I don’t know what he did, but they would not let me fall down. So I had my share of pain on the Death March. And so now the march: 106, 107 degree hot, no food, no water, on the side of the road. In the Philippines, they have wallows. The wallows fill up with water. The caribou—the water buffalo. They bathe in that wallow. They do their duty in that wallow. And we’re marching, and we’re dying of thirst, and we see that water.

00:12:34
Speaker 2: We run over.

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Speaker 3: Spread the scum and drink the water. Result: amoebic dysentery in the worst way. And so when we arrived in that first camp, O’Donnell, men started to die at 250 a day. They were dying from the effects of the march. We had one artesian well, one artesian well popping up water, you know. At O’Donnell, on the parade ground, I saw men die with a canteen in their hand, waiting to get a drink of water.

00:13:18
Speaker 1: You know.

00:13:18
Speaker 3: I do this program in Japan. These kids know absolutely nothing about World War II—zero. They don’t know a thing about World War II. And so when I go there, I made a decision. I have to think of something: what can I tell these young people about the Japanese soldiers? Can I say they’re all bad? They were all no good? Now, I can’t say that, ladies and gentlemen. You might all know right now, I have learned to forgive. I have forgiven the Japanese. Now you may think about that in terms of what I’m doing. Remember, I did it for me, not for them. I became free. I became free. And you have to be strong to be able to forgive. It’s only the weak ones that can’t forgive. The strong are able to forgive. Let’s get on with our life. And so here we were at this particular time, having to try to survive, and I said to myself, “How can I deal with these young people?” And it came up to me, and I went to the Japanese people that I knew, and I questioned them, and I talked with them, and I came up with this answer. Now, challenge—don’t challenge me on it. This is my answer. Number one. Most of the soldiers on Bataan came from little villages in Japan, and so they lived their little life in their little community, and that was all there was. No one spoke anything but what they spoke. No one looked like anything but that they did, and that’s how they lived their life. Now, all of a sudden, they’re on Bataan. Their commanding officer says, “We’ve got to move these people to that first prison camp. If they don’t move, kill them.” And the commanding officer walks away and listen. The little Japanese private says, “Well, okay, I’ll do that,” and so he sees this man fall down, and he says to the man in Japanese, “Hey, buddy, get up and move on.” The American says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t speak your language,” and the Japanese says, “Did you hear me? Fella? You get going there. I was told to make you go because if you don’t go, I have to kill you. And I don’t want to kill you, so get going.” The American sits there and says, “I still don’t understand you. I just can’t move.” The little Japanese guard says, “I guess I have to [care bang], and that’s it.” Is that possible? Well, I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t want to pretend that I do. I don’t know. I just know that when I was able to say that to the Japanese students, to make them realize that not everybody is bad, that there may be other reasons for it. One thing I was able to do was able to tell them all about Bataan, all about the horrors of war, about the POW life. I never would have been able to tell them that before I tell the story that you hear today—what happened, how horrible it was that the Japanese did this. And so if you’re able to survive the war, if you’re able to survive the Bataan Death March, if you’re able to survive that first time in the camp O’Donnell, then they put us aboard a ship and took a picture of Pan.

00:17:07
Speaker 1: And we’re listening to Dr. Lester Tenney tell his story of the Bataan Death March.

00:17:12
Speaker 2: He was there. My goodness.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: It starts with 12,000 men, and 1,700 come home. But it was the way they died. Lester told that audience at the World War II Museum. And they were treated so poorly because we surrendered, and the Japanese would rather die than surrender, so they saw our soldiers as less than human, like dogs. When we come back, more of the story of the Bataan Death March with Dr. Lester Tenney here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and with the late Dr. Lester Tenney’s story. Tenney is the author of My Hitch in Hell. When we last left off, Dr. Tenney was recounting his experiences to an audience at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans about the Bataan Death March as a POW in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. Let’s return to the story.

00:18:35
Speaker 3: The ships were called hell ships because the Japanese refused to put markings on the ships. No POW markings, no Red Cross markings, just plain ships. And when the American submarines saw these ships, they sank them. Twenty-six ships were sunk by Americans. Ten thousand Americans died because the Japanese refused to put the markings on the ships. I went into the first ship that I went into with 500 of us in the hold of a ship. Thirty-two days later we arrived in Japan. But for those thirty-two days, when a man died in the hold of that ship, we held a lottery to see who was going to get his water or his rice. There’s no picture that could describe that, believe me—none. We finally arrived, and now I’m telling you about my arrival: eighty-six Japanese companies—Mitsui, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi. These are big companies. They bought POWs from Japan and they put them to work. I was bought by Mitsui. Five hundred of us became coal miners. I shoveled coal twelve hours a day, every day for three years. Oh yes, those were the days, all right. The first day we went down in the coal mine. Now, these are a bunch of Americans who’d never been in a coal mine in their life, and now we’re going down there, and we are weak. We hadn’t eaten anything in months. So this first day down there, there were 12 Americans and two Japanese in my little group. You remember, I learned to speak Japanese. I learned to speak Japanese after ten easy beatings, not ten easy lessons—ten easy beatings. So now we’re down there. Three Americans were moving this big rock. I mean, they were a rue. They were struggling moving this rock. And the two Japanese are laughing, laughing. And I looked at him and I said, “Nani desu ka? What are you laughing about?” And they said, “Oh, three Americans, they’re so big, they’re so weak.” I said, “Yes, I bet two Japanese could have done it.” And he looks at me and he says, “Ichi ban da!” I said, “No.” He said, “Yes.” And so he grabbed a hold of that rock, and he started to move that rock. I swear he herniated himself. But he moved the rock in place, and he stood up, and I said to my friends, “Let’s give him a round of applause.” And we applauded him. The next two hours, the two Japanese built the wall. All we did was applaud them. We filled their muscles. Oh my, “Oh, you’re so strong,” and they built the wall. So we did have some fun kind of things like that. If you got out of work, you got out of work because you were sick or injured. If you were sick, you got half rations. If you were hurt in the camp, you got half rations. If you were hurt in the coal mine, you got full rations. So when a man broke an arm, or broke a leg, or broke a hand, there was always in the coal mine. Yes, we broke our own hand; we broke our own foot. We would break a bone just to get out of work. For two or three days. And if you couldn’t break it yourself, you hired a breaker. Yeah, with 1,700 men there, you could always find a man to do something. And we did have a few that were “breakers.” They would know how to break an arm, or leg, or a hand so that you didn’t have to lose it. So you had to pay for it. What did you pay? You paid so many rations of rice, or you paid cigarettes. The Japanese gave us a pack of ten cigarettes once every three, four, five, six, seven weeks. You never knew when. But if you wanted an arm broken or a leg broken, depending on what you wanted, the price would go up based on how serious it was. My hand was only five packs of cigarettes. A foot was seven packs of cigarettes. Now my arm was ten packs of cigarettes—very, very expensive. Now, how are you going to get rice? Well, let me tell you. With 1,700 men in our prison camp, you know that there’s always going to be one or two that can’t eat their food today. What do you do with the food? With the food? What? Where did I get the word “food?” The rice? You can’t save rice because rice gets sour, and if it gets sour, you better not eat it. You’re going to get sick. So what do you do with your rice when you can’t eat it? You sell it? What do you sell it for: cigarettes? How many cigarettes can you get for a ration of rice? Now, folks, I’m a retired professor of finance from Arizona State University, and I want you to know that I learned everything that was about finance in prison camp. Yeah, maybe you heard of this before. You buy low and you sell high, and that’s the whole philosophy of what we did in prison camp with our cigarettes. If I