INTERVIEW WITH JOHN DAHL:
Why did it take so long for a film to feature this particular World War II story?
“I think the war in Germany took precedence early on in the war. They were bombing London, and the Far East, if you will. Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan – it was just kind of like a little bit further away for most Americans. It feels like it kind of has faded a little bit from our memories.
It’s hard. The Japan of today is very hard to imagine what Japan was like 60 years ago. And Japan right now, you know, is one of our best allies, a great trading partner. They’re just a fabulous ally so it’s hard to kind of look back 60 years ago and realize that it was a completely different government and a different country then.”
I think also one of the reasons why this story kind of faded a little bit from our headlines is that we had 15,000 U.S. soldiers that we kind of abandoned in the Philippines. I think to realize that really there wasn’t much that we could do; our Navy was basically sunk in Pearl Harbor. We couldn’t have staged a dramatic rescue mission at that point. I think they became kind of a casualty of war.
Three years later when given the opportunity, the military came back into the Philippines with such strength and such force. They knew they had the Japanese on their heels. I think at that point there obviously was a great deal of emotion invested on the part of the Army in saying, ‘You know what? I think we can get these guys out now.’ And feeling sort of a sense of obligation to get these guys out.
Colonel Mucci had, I think, it was around 600 men at his disposal and he selected the 120 that went with him and it was completely all volunteers. In fact, he went to the 600 men and asked for volunteers and they all stepped forward so that meant he had to select 120 out of them. There was a certain sense that these were our guys and we were gonna go back and get them, and we’re going to set things right. There was kind of a feeling of an obligation. But it’s also harder to discuss your failures than it is your successes. By leaving these poor guys there and then when they came back hearing the stories…
You also have to remember that back in World War II, you didn’t have 24-hour a day media and a camera on every street corner of the world, and so these stories weren’t really being told to the public. As a matter of fact, there was an incident on Palawan where 150 soldiers were herded into air raid shelters and burned – we show that in the movie. But about 11 people survived that. They managed to escape. There was an ocean right near there, they were right on the beach, and they managed to [escape]. A couple of them swam two miles to another island. And these men came back and started telling their stories and at that point, the War Department just said, ‘You know what? We can’t tell people about this. The public will just be incensed.’
So it really didn’t service the greater good of the war to say, ‘Look, we’ve got these guys that are being starved to death. They are being beaten, they are being given no medicine.’ The Care Packages - the first aid - the Red Cross packages we’re sending them aren’t reaching them. You know, they’re not getting it and they’re being completely abused in these POW camps. People just were not aware of the wide scale abuse by the Japanese at that time of any POW, basically.”
And now’s the right time for this story to be told?
“I guess having kind of a personal connection to it with my father and his friend, who is a survivor, in a way it feels like to me it’s time to tell that story. I don’t think we want to let it slip away. I think people should know. These men need to know that people know. Most of these men that survived the Death March are in their eighties and it’s important. They’ve kind of held this sort of burden in a way, of being these guys that kind of got captured and spent the war in a POW camp. And you can only imagine what they’ve endured, what their families endured over the years. So I think it’s kind of a way of saying, ‘We respect what you did for our country. We appreciate it.’”
