Harrodsburg, Kentucky is the kind of place that makes a point of reminding you how old it is. Fair enough; it earned the right. President Franklin Roosevelt called it the oldest permanent American settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, a distinction that gives a small Kentucky county seat a unique claim to fame.
James Harrod founded it in 1774. During the American Revolution, it was one of only three functioning settlements in all of what is now Kentucky, holding on while everything around it was burned or abandoned.
By 1940, Harrodsburg was a town of about 4,700 people — farmers, merchants, small businessmen, and their families — sitting at the center of Mercer County in the Bluegrass.
It was the county seat, which meant it had the courthouse, the main street, the churches, and the kinds of institutions that give a small town its identity. People knew each other. They knew each other’s parents. Most of them expected to live and die in the same county where they were born.
Among those institutions was the 38th Tank Company of the Kentucky Army National Guard.
They met on Monday nights, upstairs above a store on Main Street in Harrodsburg. After drill, some of the men played poker or dice. They had the familiarity of neighbors; men who grew up in the same place, attended the same schools, and sat in the same pews.
They weren’t warriors. Most of them were farmers or tradesmen who had enlisted for practical reasons. Some needed the money. Others figured they were going to be drafted eventually, so they joined to get their year of service out of the way; one year active duty and done. A few were still in high school when they signed up.
The company had existed since 1932, and several of the men who left in 1940 had been part of the original unit. This wasn’t just a military unit; it was a standing piece of the town’s social fabric. You knew your sergeant at the hardware store on Thursday. You saw the man next to you in formation at church on Sunday. Harrodsburg was that kind of place.
Sixty-six men. A town of 4,700 people. Do that math yourself.
The Last Good Day
Every year on June 16, Harrodsburg celebrated the anniversary of its founding.
In 1941, the men of Company D were the heroes of that celebration. They parked their tanks on the Mercer County fairgrounds and let the town’s children climb on the hulls and watch them disassemble the guns.
The men were cheerful about it; these were still their neighbors’ kids, their cousins’ kids, the children of people they had grown up alongside. It was a fine day in a Kentucky summer.
It was the last image Harrodsburg had of those men as ordinary people.
Within months, they were loaded onto ships under secret orders. The Army wasn’t advertising where they were going or why. Their families knew they were headed somewhere in the Pacific, the newspapers could tell you that much, but the specifics were another matter.
By the time 66 men from Harrodsburg arrived in the Philippines on Thanksgiving Day, November 20, 1941, most of the town had only the vaguest sense of where on a map that was.
Eighteen days later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Hours after that, the bombs fell on Clark Field in the Philippines. The war that Harrodsburg’s men had been sent to prepare for arrived before anyone was ready; arrived, in fact, while the families back home were still making plans for Christmas.
There is no good way to describe what the following days felt like for a town of 4,700 people waiting for information from somewhere most of them had never heard of, scanning the newspapers for names they recognized. The Army didn’t offer much. The news out of the Pacific was confused, and frequently wrong.
All Harrodsburg knew for certain was that its men were somewhere in it.
The Fight
What happened on the other side of the Pacific in the weeks that followed deserves its own explanation, even in a story that isn’t primarily about the war. Because the men of Company D weren’t just participants in the Philippines campaign; they were present at an American first.
On December 22, 1941, a platoon from the 192nd Tank Battalion engaged Japanese armor at Lingayen Gulf. It was the first time American tanks fought enemy tanks in World War II. The Harrodsburg men, Company D of that battalion, were part of it. Worth thinking about for a moment.
What followed was a fighting retreat; weeks of it, brutal and grinding, across terrain the men had had almost no time to learn. They fell back toward the Bataan Peninsula with the rest of the Filipino-American forces, covering the withdrawal with their tanks, holding roads and bridges long enough for infantry to get through.
Food rations were cut in half. The Army Air Corps had been effectively destroyed in the first Japanese strikes, which meant no air cover and no resupply from above. No ships were coming. Washington had made the determination that the Philippines was not the priority, and whatever filtered down to the men on the ground, they understood their situation clearly enough.
One detail belongs here, because it is almost too much to be believed.
Before shipping out, the men had been ordered not to fire their weapons in training. Ammunition was too scarce and valuable to spend on practice. For some of them, farm boys and store clerks who had drilled on Monday nights above a Main Street store in Harrodsburg, the first shot they ever fired from a tank was at a Japanese soldier in combat; or one coming at them.
The last major tank engagement on Bataan came on March 21, 1942. By early April, Major General Edward King had reached the conclusion that further resistance would result in the massacre of his command.
Starved men, without air cover, cannot hold a line indefinitely against unlimited artillery and fresh troops, and these men had been doing it for four months. On April 8, Captain Fred Bruni assembled Company D and told them the war was over. The sergeants were told how to disable the tanks. The codeword had come down through the chain of command.
It was “Crash.”
They put sledgehammers and grenades to the machines they had fought in for months. Then they laid down what was left of their weapons and waited for the Japanese Army to arrive.
Not one of the 66 men from Harrodsburg had been killed in action. Not one.
What the Town Didn’t Know
Back in Harrodsburg, the news arrived the way bad news always did in 1942; by telegram. Western Union. A courier at the door. A few words of standardized War Department language informing a family that their son or husband had been reported killed or missing in action in the performance of his duty and in the service of his country.
Missing. That word did a great deal to affect those that read it. Some families read it as a death notification delivered delicately. Others believed, wanted desperately to believe, that missing meant alive, meant somewhere, meant eventually coming home.
The Army sent conflicting information in those early weeks, corrections chasing corrections, because the chaos of the Philippines campaign had outpaced any orderly reporting. Families received one telegram and then another, the second contradicting the first.
For a town of 4,700 people, this was not an abstraction. The families waiting for news were your neighbors. The name on the telegram was the boy who sat behind you in school, whose father you bought eggs from on Saturday, whose mother sang in the choir.
Harrodsburg didn’t have the luxury of processing this at arm’s length. Every telegram delivery on every street was visible to someone. Everyone knew who had received one.
Main Street told its own story. After the fall of Bataan, American flags lined the storefronts. Families raised flags in their front yards. In the windows of the town’s Big Store, hundreds of photographs of Harrodsburg servicemen were put on public display; a way of saying we see them, we are counting, we have not moved on.
The Army understood the burden of what Harrodsburg had given. In June 1942, on the town’s founding anniversary, just two months after the fall of Bataan, Major General Jacob Devers, commander of the Armored Force at Fort Knox, came to Harrodsburg.
He brought tanks. They rolled down Main Street in the founding day parade, substituting for the men who had driven them into battle six months earlier. Devers spoke about the Tankers’ courage and the strength of their families. He said the right things. He showed up, which mattered in that era.
And then the long waiting began in earnest, because no one could tell these families what was actually happening to their men.
Captivity
This is what was happening.
After the surrender on April 9, 1942, approximately 75,000 American and Filipino troops began a forced march of roughly 65 miles from the tip of the Bataan Peninsula to Japanese prisoner of war camps in the north.
In the heat, without food or water, men who were already starved and wrecked by malaria from months of siege were beaten and driven along the road at bayonet point.
Thousands died on the march. Those who survived arrived at Camp O’Donnell, an unfinished Filipino training facility that the Japanese had converted into a prison camp.
O’Donnell had one water faucet for the entire camp. Men stood in line for days for a drink. Some of them died while they were standing in that line. As many as 50 men died at O’Donnell every day. Men who had survived four months of combat and 65 miles of forced march were killed by dysentery and disease in a field in the Philippines.
The Harrodsburg men moved through several facilities over the following three years; O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, Bilibid Prison. Some were loaded onto Japanese transport ships with no markings to indicate prisoners were aboard.
Americans called them hell ships. Men were packed below decks in tropical heat, denied adequate food and water, for voyages that could last weeks. American submarines, with no way of knowing who was in the hull, sank ships carrying American prisoners. At least one Harrodsburg man was lost at sea that way.
Those who reached Japan were put to work. Slave labor in factories and coal mines, hauling materials for the same war machine that had captured them.
One Harrodsburg tanker was sent to a coal mine at Fukuoka that had been condemned as unsafe before the prisoners arrived. They worked in it regardless, knowing any of them could be buried alive on any given shift. He died there, killed by a fractured skull in a condemned mine in Japan, while Harrodsburg waited for news.
Back home, the families knew almost none of this. The Red Cross made limited contact. Occasional prisoner postcards arrived; censored, brief, confirming only that their men were alive.
By early 1944, Mercer County had sent over 1,100 men and women into military service total. The county’s population was 14,629. There were a lot of families with photographs in the windows. There were a lot of families waiting.
The Detail That Hurts
There is an already mentioned fact about the Harrodsburg Tankers that tends to get buried in the broader record of the Philippines campaign, and it shouldn’t be.
Of the 29 men who never came home, not a single one was killed in combat.
They had fought for four months. They had covered retreats under fire. They had been part of the first American tank-on-tank engagement of the entire war. They had held Bataan without reinforcement, without air cover, without adequate food, against a Japanese force that had every material advantage.
And not one of them died doing it.
Every man they lost, they lost in captivity. Dysentery at O’Donnell. Malaria at Cabanatuan. A condemned coal mine in Fukuoka. A torpedoed ship in the South China Sea, sunk by American weapons.
The Japanese Army did not defeat the Harrodsburg Tankers on any battlefield. It took three years of systematic starvation and forced labor to kill 29 of them; and it managed that while Harrodsburg kept flags on its storefronts and photographs in its windows and had almost no real information about any of it.
That is the story. The grinding, institutional brutality of captivity, and the equally brutal experience of a small Kentucky town that sent 66 men to a distant war and spent three years learning almost nothing about what was happening to them.
Washington had written off the Philippines. The men knew it. Their families eventually came to understand it. The polite version of that understanding was the tank parade in June 1942 and the kind words from a general who had driven down from Fort Knox. The honest version was harder to talk about.
Thirty-Seven
Liberation came in stages, which meant the news came in stages too.
On January 30, 1945, U.S. Army Rangers staged a raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp, one of the most audacious rescue operations of the war, and freed several hundred prisoners.
Bilibid Prison fell on February 4. The men who had been shipped to Japan waited longer, some until the formal Japanese surrender in September 1945, returning home months after the fighting had stopped.
William Gentry was among those freed at Cabanatuan. He had gone into Bataan with the 192nd in January 1942, fought until the surrender, walked the Death March, been held at O’Donnell and Cabanatuan, been transferred to Mindanao to work a Japanese rice farm, and then brought back to Cabanatuan in June 1944.
The Rangers found him there seven months later. He went home to Harrodsburg. He lived there for 55 more years. He died in April 2000.
What did it look like when 37 men came home to a town that had sent 66? The returns were staggered across months, so there was no single moment when the full conclusion became visible. But it became visible eventually.
Twenty-nine families received, in one form or another, confirmation of what they had most feared. The men in the photographs in the store windows weren’t coming back.
There is a detail that survived in the community’s memory, passed down through the years. One of the Tankers who came home could not sit inside the church during Sunday services. He stood outside during the sermon.
His neighbors could hear his voice from the churchyard, louder than seemed quite right for a man standing alone outside. His mother told people they would never understand what those men had suffered. And so people didn’t ask. The town had the decency not to push. These men had earned whatever distance they needed.
William Clinton Alford joined the Harrodsburg National Guard in July 1939, at 17 years old. He was captured on April 9, 1942. He survived O’Donnell and Cabanatuan, was loaded onto a hell ship called the Canadian Inventor, arrived in Japan, and worked in a coal mine at Fukuoka until the end of the war.
He made it back to San Francisco in November 1945. He eventually moved to New York. He died in January 2006, 61 years after the Rangers broke the gates at Cabanatuan.
The last surviving member of the Harrodsburg Tankers was Morgan French of Vine Grove, Kentucky. He died in 2013.
What Remains
Every year, Harrodsburg holds a ruck march. 6.6 miles; for the 66 men, for the 66-mile Death March, because that is how you honor something when the men themselves are gone.
A tank sits on permanent display on Highway 127, dedicated in 1961 when some of the survivors were still alive to stand next to it. The Harrodsburg Historical Society has preserved what it can.
These are the right gestures. They are also, inevitably, inadequate. Twenty-nine men whose remains are scattered across the Philippines, Japan, and the South China Sea cannot be fully honored with a ruck march. But the march is something. So is the number.
So is the fact that Harrodsburg has been keeping count since the June 1942 parade when the tanks came down Main Street and the men were not in them.
The question that sits underneath all of it, underneath the commemorations and the memorial events and the biographical signs along the route, is about what the United States asked of Harrodsburg and what it gave in return.
Sixty-six men from a town of 4,700 were shipped to the Philippines months before Pearl Harbor, under secret orders, to reinforce a position that Washington had already privately decided was secondary to the broader war effort. When the Japanese attacked, no relief came. MacArthur left for Australia.
The men held for four months anyway, four months longer than the Japanese had planned for, and bought time for Allied operations elsewhere. Then they surrendered and spent three years in prison camps and coal mines and the holds of unmarked ships.
The government sent General Devers with his tanks in June 1942. He said the right things. But the families of Harrodsburg were not naive people, and at some point, probably before the war even ended, they understood what had actually happened.
Their sons had been sent somewhere they couldn’t win, and then left there. The fight was brave. The outcome was predetermined.
Thirty-seven came home. Twenty-nine did not. Some are buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in Harrodsburg, in plots their families could visit. Some are listed on a wall in Manila. Some are at the bottom of the South China Sea, their graves perhaps marked as coordinates. Their town kept count. It still does.
That’s the story of the Harrodsburg Tankers. A town that answered the call, fought without complaint, waited without information, and lost nearly half of what it sent; to disease, starvation, and slave labor, not to enemy fire.
The men who would have walked the 6.6 miles themselves didn’t all make it back. So Harrodsburg walks it for them.
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