Man who served with Janesville 99 recalls ordeal of World War II
(Published Sunday, May 27, 2007 12:20:58 AM CST)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
By Mike DuPre'/Gazette Staff
JANESVILLE
The roiling clouds were so strange, they caught Abel Ortega Sr.'s attention.
"There were no other clouds that day. The sky was dark blue. These clouds would go in and out of each other, tumbling. They were all pinkish because the sun was hitting them. I'd never seen clouds like that before," Ortega said.
The clouds weren't the only strange thing that Ortega saw or experienced Aug. 9, 1945, in a POW camp in Japan. The guards did not march Ortega and other prisoners of war out to drain a lake that day as they had been doing.
Ortega watched as a train transporting tanks chugged by. Sitting on top of the tanks were Japanese civilians.
"It was very strange, very unfamiliar," he said.
The strangest sight was five days later.
"Here comes this white man in khaki walking down the road. Everybody else was Japanese. Everybody was surprised and excited to this white person. They were shouting, 'Here he comes now! Where is he?'"
Though Japanese soldiers still were on guard, the man walked up and shook the door in the prison camp's 10-foot-high wall.
The Japanese let him in, and he asked the gathered prisoners:
"Don't you guys know the war's over?"
The atomic bomb blast over Nagasaki about 100 miles south had spawned the bizarre, twisting clouds. The Japanese civilians had been fleeing the area.
The khaki-clad man's message was the beginning of the end of an ordeal that had started for Ortega and other members of Company A, 192nd Tank Battalion, in the Philippines on Dec. 8, 1941, which was Dec. 7 on the other side of the International Date Line.
Janesville had been Company A's stateside headquarters.
Most of the men in the Army National Guard unit were "The Janesville 99." Ortega, a Texan of Mexican descent, had transferred into the company after some of the 99 were assigned to the 192nd's Headquarters Company and men 29 and older were given the chance to resign from the military.
Company A landed in the Philippines on Thanksgiving Day 1941, a couple of weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched the United States into World War II.
Only 35 of the 99 survived the war. Ortega is one of only three living survivors of Company A.
Ortega remembers clearly what he did and endured:
Driving a half-track and fighting the Japanese, the Filipinos burned alive by the Japanese on the Bataan Death March, the many beatings he took, the meager rations he ate while slaving for the Japanese, the stink and screams that permeated the hold of a hell ship crammed with POWs for 38 days.
But, he said, time has been kind.
The dreams that woke him, making him feel like he was still at his captors' mercy, ended several years after the war.
"All of that's gone," he said. "It doesn't come up. I remember what happened, but none of that affects me anymore."
Ortega credits his strong Christian faith for getting him through.
"I was raised on the Scriptures. The Scriptures, the word of God, kept me alive and alert overseas."
He had no hatred for the brutal guards.
"The word of God says, 'Love your enemies.' I had to practice what I was raised up on."
One of his most vivid memories is a good one.
In the days after the war ended, American B-29 bombers dropped drums of food, medicine and clothing to the POWs.
"I smelled that coffee. Ooooh, it smelled good! For 32 years, I hadn't smelled that good, old coffee smell."
And he set the record straight on the death of Lt. Kenneth Bloomfield, who by most accounts died on the Death March.
In fact, Bloomfield died as troops were assembling to begin the infamous march, Ortega said.
Ortega and other Company A guys were trying to reach the assembly point for surrendering soldiers. They were careening in a truck, dodging both American artillery fire from the still-fighting island fortress of Corregidor and short-falling Japanese rounds.
Bloomfield had missed the truck and literally ran the artillery gauntlet for 2 or 3 miles.
"He was a little chubby. When he came to where we stopped, he ran in, huffing and puffing. That's where he died, right on the spot."
Later, memories of the dead floated back to Ortega.
"On the boat back home, knowing we were going to see our wives, sweethearts and mothers, that's when we thought of those friends we'd left behind, those who sacrificed their lives.
"I still think about them once in a while, about the friends I had who died and were left over there."
