Lester Tenney, an Army tank commander who survived one of World War II’s signature horrors, the Bataan Death March, and spent his later years pushing Japanese authorities to apologize for their country’s war atrocities, has died at age 96.
Lester Tenney, an Army tank commander who survived one of World War II’s signature horrors, the Bataan Death March, and spent his later years pushing Japanese authorities to apologize for their country’s war atrocities, has died at age 96.
“I’ve learned to forgive,” Tenney said in 2012, on the 70th anniversary of the march, “but I’ll never forget.”
Tenney’s memories of that eight-day, 73-plus mile trek and of his subsequent three years in a forced-labor coal mine — stories he shared with reporters, civic leaders, schoolchildren and in a memoir called “My Hitch in Hell” — eventually wrung apologies from government leaders and from one of the corporate giants that benefited from POW slavery.
Tenney, who lived in Carlsbad, Ca., died Friday, said David Levi, his grandson.
Born in Chicago on July 1, 1920, Lester Irwin Tenney joined the Army in 1940, and was sent to the Philippines. In December 1941, in the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces overran other islands in the Pacific, including the Philippines, and Allied forces — about 15,000 Americans and 60,000 Filipinos — retreated to the Bataan peninsula.
They fought for more than three months before they ran out of food, ammunition and room to maneuver. Major Gen. Edward King ordered them to surrender.
On the march that followed, they went the first four days without food or water. Temperatures soared past 110 degrees. Stragglers and complainers were stabbed with bayonets, shot or beheaded. “If you fell down, you died,” Tenney recalled later. “If you stopped walking, you died.”
About halfway through the march, a Japanese officer on horseback slashed Tenney in the left shoulder with a sword. Two other marchers kept him upright while a medic stitched the wound.
Tenney said he survived by setting small goals for himself as he walked. Make it to that stand of trees. Make it to that herd of water buffalo. By the time he and the other survivors staggered into Japanese prison camps, thousands had died.
“It was awful,” Tenney said. “It was inhumane. It was barbaric.”
He briefly escaped from the camp into the jungle, was recaptured, and then put on a ship to Omuta, Japan, where work in a coal mine awaited.
