The sting of defeat and bitter captivity was never far from Zero Wilson’s soul.
Five years after being liberated from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, his memories of the Bataan Death March after his surrender in the Philippines were stark and still fresh.
“I have seen the American way of life change in one moment, and have seen the stunned, bewildered faces of the erstwhile American high command as they tried to comprehend the enormity of the blow that had struck them,” he said in a speech to the National Insurance Association in 1950.
“I have seen veteran officers schooled for 30 years in traditional authority and routine of command change overnight into tired, dirty, beaten, unshaven old men just trying to keep walking to the next water hole.”
Retired Army Col. Ovid O. “Zero” Wilson survived but never forgot the desperate desire for a sip of water that came with his first days as a prisoner. A lieutenant colonel then, he was an aide and staff officer to Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who commanded American and Filipino forces.
He grew up a poor farming kid in Normangee, a town 36 miles north of College Station, and went to West Point, graduating in 1924 and marrying into a San Antonio family. His wife, Betty, followed him to the Philippines but returned to the Alamo City with their three children as tensions rose with Tokyo. Before they parted, Wilson gave Betty his West Point ring.
The Wilsons lived in a house on Howard Street, where they waited for word, which came in 3-by-5-inch postcards captives were given to write brief messages. The neighboring Tully and Clark families waited with them. The Clarks would produce a future commander in San Antonio — now-retired Lt. Gen. Robert Clark, who led the 5th U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston, now Army North.
In one postcard, Zero Wilson described his health as “excellent.” He would come home in reasonably good shape in fall 1945, but not before horrid encounters with death and men pushed beyond their limits.
Wainwright also survived. At war’s end, he watched the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri and would be awarded the Medal of Honor.
Wilson moved to Houston after retiring from the Army in 1954 and died there at age 80 in 1982. He was buried in Forest Park Westheimer Cemetery, where a grandson, Jeff Wilson, and other family members gathered Saturday.
Over the past 15 years or so, the Wilson, Clark and Tully clans have met at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery on Memorial Day to honor close-knit wartime bonds. They’d start at one grave, a family member telling a story about the deceased, then move on, spending the better part of the morning trading family tales steeped in military history.
But not this year.
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“We decided not to have our normal gathering at Fort Sam because of the virus and restriction on gathering,” explained Zero Wilson’s son Joe Wilson, 88, of San Antonio, a retired Army colonel. He couldn’t make it to Houston this weekend, either.
Death March
The war raging on the other side of the globe started 78 years ago for Americans with Japan’s bombing of U.S. military bases in the Philippines, Midway, Wake Island and Guam the same morning it attacked Pearl Harbor.
The empire swept quickly across the Pacific in the weeks that followed, its invasion of the Philippines pushing U.S. forces into the Bataan Peninsula north of Manila Bay, where they surrendered April 9, 1942. The island redoubt of Corregidor, at the mouth of the bay, fell May 6.
Wilson was among 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners taken on Bataan and forced to march 66 miles to a holding area at Camp O’Donnell. Roughly 54,000 made it. Most of those who died or escaped along the way were Filipinos. The trek killed an estimated 600 Americans.
A large group of POWs was moved to Cabanatuan about two months later, but the conditions in both places were similar. Around 3,000 prisoners lay sick in Cabanatuan’s hospital, with 40 dying every night in 1942. Guards beat and sometimes killed their captives, who lived on a rice gruel that occasionally included bits of fish. Four out of 10 prisoners died over the course of the war. Survivors lost half their body weight.
“Most people remember what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, but on the other side of the international date line, on Dec. 8 … for those roughly 75,000 Philippine and American soldiers, they were from that point cut off,” said another of Zero Wilson’s grandsons, Gen. Stephen W. “Seve” Wilson, now the Air Force vice chief of staff. “They destroyed all the airfields on the ground, and they had no resupply from that point forward.
“The reason they surrendered is they had no food, no ammunition, no medicine — and back then, beriberi, dysentery, malaria, all those tropical (diseases) were rampant.”
As bad as the war was in that moment, it would get far worse.
“The conservative number is 68 million people were killed in World War II and 100 million injured,” Wilson said. “And if you work that out, it says it’s something like 33,000 people were killed a day over 2,000 days in World War II. That’s what the world was doing in this period of great wars between great powers, and all that happened before nuclear weapons.”
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Guerrilla resistance against the Japanese continued in the Philippines, and with U.S. advances in the Pacific drawing closer, the prisoners’ experience grew even more hellish as their captors attempted to move them elsewhere.
Some 1,600 prisoners were crammed aboard a ship, got four spoonfuls of water a day, drank their own urine and, Zero Wilson recalled, cut the throats of their fellow prisoners to drink their blood. The ship was sunk. Survivors boarded another — and when it was sank, a third. All but 230 died.
Wilson, who said he got the name “Zero” because of his math scores at West Point and hated his middle name, Oscar, weighed 100 pounds when he was liberated in Manchuria.
His wartime experience led him to develop a character test: Pick your 10 best men, starve them for a month and bring them into a room with enough steaks for each, in different sizes. The man who takes the smallest steak, he said, is the one with the greatest strength of character.
“But a word of caution if you use this system: Don’t stand too near the biggest steak, or you’ll get trampled to death in the rush,” he said in his 1950 remarks.
Wilson came home to his family and the good life. Unlike many war veterans, he would talk about his worst experiences if asked and was described as a great storyteller who didn’t appear to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Wainwright, whose first command after graduating from West Point was with a cavalry unit in Texas, came to San Antonio in 1946 as a four-star general to head the 4th U.S. Army and retired the next year. He remained in the Alamo City and died at Brooke Army Medical Center in 1953.
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Both of his sons went to West Point, including Joe, who attended Central Catholic High School before the family moved to Fort Benning, Ga., in 1946.
“My uncle was the class of ’50, and my dad was the class of ’53,” said Stephen Wilson, who currently is the highest-ranking Texas A&M graduate in the armed forces.
Joe Wilson and his brother, Gail Francis Wilson, both were battalion commanders in Vietnam. Gail Wilson was killed there in 1967.
Appreciating the good life
The Death March, Cabanatuan and the hell ships gave Zero Wilson a broad view, and he distilled those lessons in his speech to the insurance association 70 years ago.
“There are a lot of unhappy people in this country. You only have to read the papers to be convinced that someone is ruining it; the Democrats, the Republicans, the Protestants, the Catholics,” he said.
“Well, you’ve got air to breathe, haven’t you? You’ve got water to drink and good food to eat, and nobody’s kicking your wife and kids around; you’re free, aren’t you? And if you don’t like what someone says, you can say so, can’t you? Listen, you’ve never had it so good.”
He described prisoners packed by the thousands into a tin, windowless tobacco warehouse in Luboa one night during the Death March, “in a standing position so that when a man passed out, he couldn’t fall, and when he died, they remained standing.” In the 10 hours he was stuck there, all he could think of was air, green trees, sunlight and especially water.
A West Point classmate and close friend who also survived those years of captivity began a tradition after the war. Every April 18, a bad day on the Death March, they’d find a water spigot and turn it on.
Then they’d watch the water flow.
“I remember asking him one day, ‘Aren’t you glad that you gave Mom your West Point ring and that you have it now?’ Joe Wilson said of a conversation with his father. “And he said, ‘No. Had I had it, I would have traded it for a cup of water.’”
Sig Christenson covers the military and its impact in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Sig, become a subscriber. sigc@express-news.net | Twitter: @saddamscribe
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