the list is still at Cabanatuan, and it contains many hundreds 
 
of names which have not yet been announced by the Japanese.
 
     The death rate at O'Dormell, we learned, had been
 
frightful. Many of the prisoners had fought on to the end at
 
Bataan although wounded or ill. After the deathmarch there
 
was hardly a man who was not clearly a hospital case by the time
 
he reached 0'Donnell. Careful estimates from many of the officers
 
who survived place the number of Americans who died there in April
 
and May at twenty-two hundred. I have been assured that this
 
number is conservative, despite the confusion which necessarily 
 
existed in the midst of such wholesale sickness and death. This
 
confusion was heightened by the fact that Filipinos were dying
 
at the rate of five hundred a day, with Americans dying at the
 
rate of fifty a day. The problem of burial of these bodies 
 
became extremely acute (just as it also became at Cabanatuan).
 
The Japs would not help with this work. The Filipinos and
 
Americans were so weak that there were not enough healthy men 
 
to dig the graves. As a result, the camp became so littered 
 
with bodies that it was sometimes hard to tell the living from
 
the dead.
 
     This death rate at O'Donnell finally became so alarming
 
that the Japanese began to discharge the Filipinos as soon as they
 
became ill, hoping that they would die in the bosom of their
 
families and thus free the Japs of responsibility. American  
 
officers say that, of the 45,000 Filipinos who started out from
 
Batsan on April 9, 1942, fully 27,000 had died by the end of May, 
 
when the surviving Americans were transferred to Cabanatuan.
 
                                         - 35 -