Texas People, Texas Places by Taylor Lonn;Patoski Joe Nick;

Author:Taylor, Lonn;Patoski, Joe Nick; [Taylor, Lonn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TCU Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

29

MYRRL MCBRIDE, PRISONER OF WAR

THIS SATURDAY, April 9, will be the sixty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Bataan. The names of Bataan and the island fortress of Corregidor are fading from memory now, in the same way that the names of the World War I battles of the Meuse-Argonne and Belleau Wood had lost their power by the time my generation came along. As a child growing up in the Philippines, Bataan and Corregidor were very real to me. I could look out of the front windows of our Manila house and see the mountainous peninsula of Bataan and the low island of Corregidor across the bay; the sun set behind them every night. One of the verses of my school song began, Across the blue Pacific, in the shadow of old Bataan. I knew about the 1942 battle there in which the American army made its last stand against the Japanese, and about General McArthur leaving Corregidor at night in a PT boat, the subsequent surrender, the Death March, and the Japanese prison camps at Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan.

Several Big Bend men were on Bataan and Corregidor. One, Myrrl McBride of Fort Davis, survived the Death March and three and a half years of Japanese captivity to come home and tell about his experiences. The McBride family moved to Fort Davis from Marfa in 1933 and opened a café there. Myrrl McBride graduated from Fort Davis High School and went to Sul Ross for two years before moving to New Mexico to attend the University of New Mexico. He was living in Grants, New Mexico, working to earn tuition, when he was caught by the peacetime draft in March 1941. In a letter to Fort Davis journalist Barry Scobee, published in the Alpine Avalanche in May 1941, he described how he and a group of other draftees went to Santa Fe by bus, were sworn in at the National Guard armory there, and then sent by train to Fort Bliss, where he was assigned to the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment.

The 200th Coast Artillery was one of the unluckiest regiments in World War II. It was originally formed as a New Mexico National Guard cavalry regiment after World War I, and a lot of young New Mexico men joined it during the Depression because they could fool around with horses and collect a few dollars a month in drill pay. In January 1941, the regiment was called into Federal service and retrained in anti-aircraft gunnery. That summer, because most of its men were Hispanic New Mexicans who could speak Spanish, it was sent to the Philippine Islands. It was still there when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and it covered the withdrawal of the American and Filipino forces in northern Luzon to the Bataan peninsula. The regiment surrendered to the Japanese when Bataan fell. Of its eighteen hundred men, fewer than half made it back home after the war, and of those a third died within a year of their return.

Myrrl McBride managed to write his parents a letter from Bataan.

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