Some Survived

Manny Lawton was a twenty-three-year-old Army captain on April 8 1942 when orders came to surrender to the Japanese forces invading the Philippine Islands. The next day he and his fellow American and Filipino prisoners set out on the infamous Bataan Death March--a forced six-day sixty-mile trek under a broiling tropical sun during which approximately eleven thousand men died or were bayoneted clubbed or shot to death by the Japanese. Yet terrible as the Death March was for Manny Lawton and his comrades it was only the beginning. When the war ended in August 1945 it is estimated that some 57 percent of the American troops who had surrendered on Bataan had perished.