By james art 
“The only time my father would ever talk to me or someone else other than his [Army] friends for his experiences [in the Philippines and Japan]”, Says Bill Cox,” it was when I heard him say something to one of my drinking friends, and after he expedited, I asked my father about it. “
The 77 -year -old Cox is the son of the late CPL. Oscar Avery Cox, which serves in battery F from the 200th Coast Artillery of the National Guard of New Mexico. The Elder Cox Was Born in 1922 in Corona, Lincoln County, Grew Up in Artesia, and Joined the National Guard at Age 19. He Was Deployed, Along With More Than Gieri The summer of 1941 of these troops, 829 died, and 987 survived after the test that awaited them in Asia.
In the Philippines, CPL. Cox survived the battle of Bataan, March of the death of Bataan and his internment in various Pow camps. He passed the trip on a hell of a ship to the Japanese archipelago. It was closed at the largest POW camp in Japan, Fukuoka Pop Camp #17, by Mitsui Miike Mine Mine, also the biggest in Japan, where CPL. Cox and other allied prisoners and Chinese prisoners worked and many died. He encountered hunger, illness, beatings, despair and the death of hundreds of young men like him.
During these trials, CPL. Cox and three other new Mexican soldiers hid and defended an American flag that they had saved in Bataan. If they had been caught with this, they would most likely have paid with their lives, says Loreta Huit, director of the New Mexico Military Museum.
CPL. Cox’s son Bill, who himself served in Vietnam, brought together years of whispers and midfielded questions about what happened to his father, who died in 2007, and his fellow soldiers at the quiet theater. “My father told me about how difficult it was if any of the marches [during the Bataan Death March] He fell and couldn’t come back alone, “Cox says. “The guards who kept my father’s segment from the hike will enter and put a bayonet through the man and let him bleed to death and tell all Americans and others that if they try to lift him, they will kill and them. “
Veteran, former PoS and author Ralph Rodriguez (1917-2018) from New Mexico is one of the subjects in Hampton Sides’ book Ghostly soldiersS
Hampton countries
This year marks the 80th anniversary of several victorious events at the Pacific Theater. Many have to do with the liberation of POW camps in the Philippines and Japan, where thousands of American and other allied soldiers, as well as civilians, died of starvation, disease, exhaustion or torture.
To mark the first two of these anniversaries – the liberation of the Cabanatuan camp on January 31 and the Santo Tomash camp on February 3 – the Military Museum in New Mexico opened openings openings Freedom Flags: Worship of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of our Bataan prisonersS One of the flags on the show is CPL itself. Cox and his three New Mexican counterparts wore and defended. Huit refers to him as an illegal American flag.
“A lot of them [New Mexico National Guard] The units, and to F, were regional units, “says Huight. “So, the boys who grew up together in Klovis or Arthesia or Roswell, Albukerke, or Santa Fe, or anywhere they entered together and were all in a battalion together. [Oscar] Avery [Cox] It was in battalion F with a group of artysia. These were the children he grew up with, and so they knew each other from school, from the neighborhood and already had this connection. With this companionship and the brotherhood and this flag to share, I think that also helped them survive such horrific conditions. “
The responsibility of attending the flag gave the soldiers something to do all day, adds Huit: “Strategizing how they will keep it hidden, when they would pass it on to each other where they would hide it next, who will look to make sure that no one will find it. The flag gave them a mental way out to withstand and continue. “
The first 80 commemorative event – the opening of the new exhibition – took place at the museum where Huit talks with the writer of Santa Fe and historian Hampton. Countries have written Ghostly soldiers (2002), which tells the story of exceptional liberation from US Rangers and Filipino guerrillas from the Cabanatuan camp, the largest POW camp in Asia, where just over 500 prisoners of war remained until the beginning of 1945. The book also tells the story of the death of Bataan’s death and the intervention of prisoners of war at the O’Donnel camp, from where the survivors were sent to other camps or to hell ships.
On the publication Ghostly soldiersCountries set up the Donation Fund for Ghost Soldiers under the Community Foundation Santa Fe and gave some of their salaries to the soft covers of the Fund; Much of the money in the fund, Sides says, came from the readers of the book across the country. The Ghost Soldiers’ Delight Fund is dedicated to the preservation of the memory of veterans from Bataan and Corigidor is through archives, museums and monuments and welcomes donations.
A second commemorative event was set up on Saturday, February 8th at the Violet Crown cinema and includes a screening of the director of the director of The big raid – A 2005 Miramax movie, directed by John Dahl, based on the book’s book – conversation with the author and signing a book. Bill Cox will be present as well as Susan Delaware, daughter of SGT. Jack Hoover Oldrick, who fights with CPL. Cox in Bataan, who survived the march of Bataan’s death and, like Cox, lasts for years in Pow’s camps.
Delaware’s father did not like to dwell on painful memories and would end any story he shared with hope. He once told Delaware about the train that during the march of Bataan’s death, he was transporting surviving prisoners of war from San Fernando to the O’Donnel camp and the men who were killed in the narrow and non -sanitary conditions in the boxes of the train. “But then my father said that when they [POWs] They managed to open the door of the train a little, they were strewn with something, “she says. “Something would hit them and hit them. They looked like the Philippine people threw food in the train car. “
Bataan’s transmission – and what followed, including the death of Bataan’s death and the internation of US troops in POW camps – was a technical military defeat. For this reason, perhaps not much outside the Philippines and New Mexico honor the victim of Philippine and American troops sent to the Philippines in 1941.
“New Mexico is the only condition that really notes that [the Bataan Death March]Says Trevor Getz, a professor of world history at the State University of San Francisco.
GETT was interviewed for the short documentary Bataan Death March (2021), directed by Jesse Color Sutrlly, in which Getz says “the first Japanese air strikes in the Philippines occurred within 10 hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. They will essentially be those men on earth who will protect the Philippine Islands from the Japanese. And it became clear in early April [1942] that they will not be able to withstand. “
On April 9, three months and two days in the battle of Bataan, Major General Edward P. King, commander of the US Army forces in the Far East, surrendered to Colonel Muto Nakayama of the Imperial Japanese Army and ordered to surrender to surrender to surrender to his US troops.
“The march of Bataan’s death [that followed the surrender] It is not very remembered in American society and this can be because Americans do not really like to remember things that are seen as damage, “Geetz says in the documentary. “And it’s actually some problem. It was a traumatic event, a meaningful event, and we must note it more in our society. “
This may be related to how far the Philippines from the US are or maybe that’s what we value more: victory or human courage.
“The way we note [historic events] definitely says something about who [we are] And how do we get along as a nation, “Getz says PasatimpoS “The American refusal to admit or understand the suffering of those who have been defeated [in Bataan]And the way we turn our backs on them – we just don’t know what to do, we can’t handle these things. Still, it’s been a long time since there was an undoubted American victory in something, you know? We have to start dealing with these things. “
As he writes Ghostly soldiersCountries came out with a decision. “I found a way to write about defeat in a way that was for victory,” he says. “This is the attack that released the camp of the Cabanatuan Pow, was an attack that saved the last survivors of the march of Bataan’s death and allowed me to tell the story of the march of death with all its bright details, but with the knowledge given to readers that After all, you will be able to find redemption. “
Parties say that the 20 or more US Rangers for whom he interviewed Ghostly soldiers They were eager to speak, and many told him that the liberation of the camp was the biggest thing they had done in their lives. What they had experienced was victory.
On the other hand, some former Pows countries, on the other hand, was difficult for him to tell him their stories. A lot, he says, shouted. “What is unusual in these guys is that they have not just had a military experience,” Sides says. “They had this incredible battle [Bataan]S But then they had this captive experience, which was long and heavy and terrible and a nightmare. These are two layers of difficulties that they had to sift and try to understand. “
When he visited many ex -lies in their homes, he saw the remains of what they had passed during the war. “Some would never eat rice,” Sides says. “They wouldn’t even throw a rice at their own daughter’s wedding. But they stored food in their house because they were afraid of hunger. There will be a drawer full of candy and another drawer somewhere, somewhere stored with beef, or a freezer full of all the moose meat they could ever eat because they never wanted to starve. “
The battle of Bataan, March of Bataan’s death and the horrors of nearly three years in the POW camps left deep scars. “I have never slept in the same room as my father in my life,” says Bill Cox, who was born in CPL. Cox and his wife three years after the war. “He had what we called PTSR today, and had a hell of a lot of bad memories that would pop up. Sometimes she will be wild when she dreamed. … He knew the hell, through which the things that would attack him at night. “
In September 1942, when the surviving prisoners of the Fukuoka camp # 17 saw that the guards had left, CPL. Cox ran to the coal mine and escaped from his hiding place to the American flag, which he and his three New Mexican weapons brothers had defended after the battle of Bataan. He removed the Japanese flag from his flagship in the center of the camp and lifted the American. Pows signed the Japanese flag that CPL. Later, Cox split into two and shared with one of his friends.
On the ship back to the United States, two more former lies asked for a quarter of the signed Japanese flag.
CPL. Cox returned to New Mexico with the American flag, a small Japanese flag he had taken from the camp’s chalet, and his own neighborhood of the Japanese. All three sites are currently on display at the New Mexico Military Museum.
Bill Cox and his wife, Alison, along with Huit, the director of the museum, continue to look for the other three quarters of the signed flag.