Remember the Road to Bataan

Remember the Road to Bataan: Training for War in a Resource-Short Environment (Reserve Component) How a California Army National Guard Tank Battalion derived a reduced-OPTEMPO training strategy based on the inspiration of its historic legacy.

At 2100 hours on 8 September 1941, the 194th Tank Battalion, composed of National Guard divisional tank companies from California, Minnesota, and Missouri, sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco harbor aboard the USAT President Coolidge. Under darkened ship conditions, the gray hulls slid west, guarded by the sleek dark shape of the cruiser USS Astoria. Their destination was Manila harbor in the Philippines. After what must have seemed an eternity, almost exactly four years later, on 12 September 1945, the survivors embarked again, this time from Yokohama, Japan. While in various prison camps in the Philippines, Taiwan (Formosa), and Japan, these citizen-soldiers had suffered terribly. As a case in point, of the 108 men of Company C from Salinas, California, only 47 returned home in the fall of 1945.

Yet their sacrifice had not been in vain. From December 1941 to May 1942, the 194th and 192nd Tank Battalions, comprising the 149th Tank Group (Provisional) defended central Luzon and then the Bataan Peninsula from units of the invading Japanese 14th Army. These National Guardsmen were part of the first U.S. tank unit to go overseas in WWII, the first U.S. tank unit to engage the enemy in WWII, and the first U.S. tank unit to engage enemy tanks in the history of the U.S. Armored Force. In the process, they earned three Presidential Unit Citations in a five-month period. The only mechanized force available to the U.S. Armed Forces, Far East (USAFFE), they repeatedly blunted Japanese infantry and tank assaults, extending the Japanese seizure of the Philippines far beyond the timeline Japanese planners expected. The Japanese 14th Army, tied down by this tenacious defense, was unavailable for the Japanese drive south in that dark spring of 1942. That drive was stopped, only barely, by the courageous last-ditch defenses of Port Moresby, on the island of New Guinea, and at the Battle of the

34 ARMOR — November-December 1998