Life without Christmas
For World War II POW, every day is Christmas

Long-time Gallup resident and Bataan Death March survivor Timothy Smith reflects on his time spent as a POW during WWII, and the life he has lived as a Gallupian since the war ended. Smith said the experience brought him into contact with some Gallup residents and once the war ended he moved to Gallup, "Us New Mexico boys, one thing we did, we stuck together." [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Leslie Wood
Staff writer

A pair of weathered and worn notebooks contain handwritten notes made by Tim Smith during his time in captivity in a Japanese POW camp. Smith said he had to hide the notebooks so that the Japanese guards would not confiscate or destroy them. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

GALLUP — World War II Veteran Tim Smith considers each day Christmas, after spending several holidays as a prisoner of war and surviving the Bataan Death March.

During World War II, Smith and his colleagues were at the mercy of Japanese military personnel who didn’t celebrate the holidays, which meant little recognition of the day so many Americans hold so dear.

The holidays came and went similar to that of any other day in a POW camp.

“There was no celebration. No nothing,” Smith recalled of the holidays overseas. “We worked from sun up to sun down.”

Work included extensive shifts on airfields, digging canals and building mass graves for his fallen military brothers.
Smith, an Albuquerque native, joined the National Guard (111th Cavalry) while a senior in High School. He later attended the University on New Mexico until his cavalry was converted to the 200th Coast Artillery Anti-Aircraft division of the Army.

He was subsequently shipped to the Philippines to ward off Japanese aggression on Sept. 16, 1941.

On the first day of the war, Smith’s regiment shot down some of the first Japanese planes to fly over the Philippine islands.

“This was only the beginning of a valorous but futile defense against an overwhelming enemy strength,” Smith said.

American forces surrendered to Japanese military officials on April 9, 1942, at the Bataan peninsula after they ran out of ammunition and food rations.

Survival
For the next three years, Smith would focus on little else but survival.

He and his regiment were taken prisoner and forced to march 60 kilometers from Bataan to San Feranando.

He summed up the experience with a series of words: endless walking, tired, hungry, no food, hot sun, little water, no stops to rest and terrible brutality.

Japanese leaders would kill exhausted prisoners with bayonets, if they stopped to rest.

“They would fall down, too weak to go on,” Smith said of some of his fellow soldiers.

Smith said compassionate Filipino people would lay buckets of water along the Bataan Death March route to help struggling American soldiers. However, Japanese soldiers would kick over the buckets and kill those who were partial to the Americans’ plight.

During the next few years, Smith was transferred to and from various prison camps where he subsisted on rice and little else. The work was intense and endless, with disease such as dysentery rampant among soldiers.

Smith said he learned of a rather rustic remedy to dysentery from a doctor at one of the camps. He and other soldiers would eat charcoal from pieces of wood to fight the horrible disease.

“I think that’s why I like burnt toast so much today,” Smith joked.

Smith relied on his faith in God and support from his fellow soldiers to survive, some of whom where from the Gallup area. He also kept a detailed record of his experiences in a journal he smuggled into each camp.

“They didn’t want any form of writing of what happened,” Smith said of his Japanese captors.

Smith remembers the day of his liberation when American planes buzzed across the sky with no resistance from the Japanese.

Within time, the former prisoners of war were aboard trains traveling toward home.

Back home
When Smith arrived in the United States, he spent nearly a year and a half in El Paso and Santa Fe hospitals recovering from medical conditions he received overseas.

After his release, he began work at the Gallup postal service where one his military friends worked. He’s remained in the area for 40 plus years and is now retired with his wife.

Smith spoke little of his experiences as a prisoner of war until his grandchild asked him about his service as part of a project for school. In a typed response to her questions, he wrote the following:

“As I get older I can feel the affects of the beatings and starvation, but I have no animosity toward the Japanese. I am not a person who harbors hatred and consequently put that part of my life to rest. I am just happy to be free in this great land called America and home with my loved ones.”