Death March
Gallup woman visits father's POW camp

A model of the Mukden prison camp where Burrola saw out the war sits inside one of the two remaining buildings of the camp. [Courtesy Photo]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — As a child, Rosemary Chavez did not think much of her otherwise healthy father's occasional trips to the hospital to have an odd rash looked at. At the time, it was just one more mystery in an adult world still out of her reach.

There were other anomalies about William Burrola that confounded his young daughter as well, like the flashes of a stubborn man that tinged but never overshadowed an indomitably "happy-go-lucky" spirit.

For most of his adult life, Burrola, a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army's 200th Coastal Artillery Unit during the Second World War, spoke sparingly of his service in the Philippines, even less of his years as a prisoner of war. A survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March, he spent the last four years and four months of the war a captive of the Japanese.

"I think after the war they just wanted to forget what they'd seen, because they'd seen so much death and killing," Chavez said.

But grandchildren have a way of softening the heart. And when Burrola's asked about the war for a school project, a 70-year-old man opened up. As Burrola told them his stories, Chavez listened, and the final pieces of her father started falling into place. Burrola's death in 2001 freed up military and medical records that added to the picture. But it was a recent trip to China, to the prison camp where her father saw out the war, that let Chavez finish the puzzle.

Bataan to Mukden
A trip to China was the last thing Chavez was looking for while perusing the latest issue of Quan, a magazine for veterans of the war. Although her father had passed away years ago, her mother never let the subscription run out. But when she came across an ad from the Truth Council for World War II in Asia, a private group out of North Carolina organizing a May trip to Mukden, Chavez "jumped" at the chance.

Mukden had played a leading role in her father's war stories, the northeastern Chinese city where he would serve most of his time. More than that, it was the final destination of a harrowing journey that for Burrola and hundreds of other U.S. soldiers started out on the beaches of Manila Bay.

Burrola and his regiment were stationed on the Philippine island of Luzon when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in the early morning hours of Dec. 7, 1941. A few hours later, Japanese planes were strafing their own positions. American and Philippine forces held out for the next four months. Finally forced to the tip of Bataan Peninsula, the Pacific Ocean at their backs, they surrendered April 8. What followed was a 12-day journey, most of it by foot, that's come down through history as the Bataan Death March.

Accounts of the precise distance traveled and of the number of prisoners who perished along the way vary. Roughly 12,000 U.S. troops started out for Camp O'Donnell, some 70 miles to the north. By the personal accounts of the soldiers who lived to tell about it, for every one who survived, two would die.

Burrola's accounts, for all its horror, is typical. Along with photos and records, Chavez collected them in a three-hole folder she copied and handed out to family and friends before leaving for China. In it, Burrola tells of the almost sadistic zeal of his captors. Prisoners not claimed by exhaustion, thirst, hunger or disease were shot or stabbed at the slightest provocation or none at all. Prisoners who refused to bury their comrades alive risked joining them in the grave. At night, guards would pick out a sick prisoner and mockingly lunge at him with a bayonet. If the prisoner had the strength to defend himself, the guards would run him through.

"It was their way of having fun," Burrola said.

On the first day of the march, he watched a Japanese soldier toss a wounded prisoner in front of a column of tanks. By the time it passed, he recalled, the prisoner had "disappeared." His only trace was a uniform pressed into the cobblestone road.

From O'Donnell, the Japanese sent the prisoners to camps across their new empire. Burrola and his brother, Joe, who also survived the war, ended up in Mukden.

Life was easier there, but still not easy. Burrola worked long hours, first at a machine plant, then a leather factory. Bitter winters replaced the stifling tropical heat of the South Pacific. The cruelty continued.

"Some of the brutality was just so incredibly senseless," said Pat Wang, whose husband K.L. helped found the Truth Council.

She's heard stories of guards ordering prisoners outside in the dead of winter, to strip naked, circle a distant tree, and put their cloths back on.

Liberation finally arrived Aug. 15, 1945. Allied forces kept the prisoners in Mukden for another two weeks before shipping them home.

Past to present
Chavez was surprised to see that a bustling city of millions, renamed Shenyang, had grown up around the camp when she arrived in late May. The only reminders of the camp a single-story building of gray brick for the Japanese officers and a two-story building beside it that housed the prisoners now sat quietly in the shadows of a neighborhood full of factories and towering apartment blocks.

Inside the larger of the two buildings, replicas of the beds the soldiers slept in lie as they did during the war. Inside the other, a scale model of the camp circa 1942 sits in the middle. Photographs of camp life adorn the walls. Next to the photos is a list of the 1,494 prisoners who stayed at the camp, including the more than 200 who died there. The names are ordered by prison numbers. Standing before the board, Chavez scrolled down to 300: William Burrola.

More than a month later, back in Gallup, Chavez holds no anger toward the Japanese for what they did to her father. What she has, instead, is a deeper understanding of the man he was.

"I'm getting to understand more why he had the personality that he had," Chavez said.

The trip, she added, gave her "a small picture of how they suffered, being brutalized by the Japanese, emotionally and physically."

Paradoxically, it shed light on opposite sides of her father.

There was the fun-loving, easy-going spirit she remembers most.

"When they came home (from the war), they were so close to death that they wanted to live life to the fullest," Chavez said.

But there was another side.

"He was stubborn," Chavez said. "I always wondered why he would say no to everything first, and then he would be OK with it."

She now sees it as a vestige of the war, a reflexive, if misplaced, defiance toward taking any more orders.

As for the rash, Burrola's doctors prescribed it to post traumatic stress syndrome, a phenomenon not recognized until years after the war.

For Chavez, Mukden helped her connect with the past. For the Wangs, who've been leading tours to the museum since 2002, it's just as much about connecting the past to the present.

It's often said that those who don't remember the past are destined to repeat it. She and her husband, who escaped China before it fell to the communists in the years leading up to the war, had hoped that showing people how the Japanese treated their prisoners might teach other Americans how to treat their own. But the things they hear and read about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib give them little hope.

"There's an awful lot of similarities," Pat Wang said. "We haven't learned our lesson."