Cpl. Bruno J. Pierotti

    It is not known when Bruno became a member of the 192nd, but it may have been after the maneuvers of 1941.  He was assigned to Headquarters Company.

    The morning of December 8, 1941, just ten hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bruno watched the Japanese attack on Clark Field.  He and his company were ordered to the north end of the main runway before the attack.  During the attack, he could do little more than watch since his company did not have the weapons needed to fight airplanes.

    For the next four months, Bruno worked to supply the letter companies of the battalion with the supplies needed to fight.  The morning of April 9, 1942, Capt. Fred Bruni informed his company of the surrendered and gave orders that any supplies that could be used by the Japanese should be destroyed.   It was on this date that Bruno became a Prisoner of War.

    On April 11th, the first Japanese soldiers appeared at HQ company's encampment.  A Japanese officer ordered Joseph and the rest of his company, with their possessions, out onto the road that ran in front of their encampment.  Once on the road, the soldiers were ordered to kneel along the sides of the road.  They were told to put their possessions in front of them.  As they knelt, the Japanese soldiers, who were passing them, went through their possessions and took whatever they wanted from the Americans.

    Bruno with his company boarded trucks and drove to Mariveles.  From there, they walked to Mariveles Airfield and sat and waited.  As they sat, the POWs noticed a line of Japanese soldiers forming across from them.  They soon realized that this was a firing squad and the Japanese were going to kill them.

    As they sat watching and waiting to see what the Japanese intended to do, a Japanese officer pulled up in a car in front of the Japanese soldiers.  He got out of the car and spoke to the sergeant in charge of the detail.  The officer got back in the car and drove off.  The Japanese sergeant ordered the soldiers to lower their guns.  

    Later in the day, Bruno's group of POWs was moved to a school yard in Mariveles. The POWs were left sitting in the sun for hours.  The Japanese did not feed them or give them water.  Behind the POWs were four Japanese artillery pieces which began firing on Corregidor and Ft. Drum.  These two islands had not surrendered.  Shells from these two American forts began landing among the POWs.  The POWs could do little since they had no place to hide.  Some POWs were killed from incoming American shells.  One group that tried to hide in a small brick building died when it took a direct hit.  The American guns did succeed in knocking out three of the four Japanese guns.

    The POWs were ordered to move again by the Japanese.  Bruno and the other men had no idea that they had started what became known as the death march.  During the march he received no water and little food.  At San Fernando, he was put into a small wooden boxcar and taken to Capas.  The cars could hold forty men or eight horses.  The Japanese packed 100 men into each car.  Those who died remained standing until the living climbed out of the car.  From Capas, Joseph walked the last ten miles to Camp O' Donnell.

   Camp O'Donnell was an unfinished Filipino training base that the Japanese pressed into service as a Prisoner of War camp.  It turned out to be a death trap with as many as fifty POWs dying each day.  There was only one working water faucet for the entire camp.  To get a drink, men stood in line for days.  Many died while waiting for a drink.

    Seeing that the conditions in the camp were terrible, the Japanese opened a new camp at Cabanatuan.  Bruno and the other healthy POWs were sent to the camp while those too ill to be moved remained at Camp O'Donnell.

    Bruno was selected for a work detail to repair trucks and other equipment for the Japanese.  The POWs worked at the Bachrach Garage which was on an island off Manila.  He was spent over a year on this detail.

    At some point, Bruno was sent on a work detail to Nichols Field.  The POWs literally built a runway by tearing down a mountain by hand.  The camp they lived in was about a mile from the airfield and known as Pasay School.  

    The Japanese, knowing the it was just a matter of time before the POWs would be liberated, began to ship large numbers of the POWs to Japan or another occupied country.  On October 10, 1944, Bruno, with other POWs, was marched to the Port Area of Manila.  They were scheduled to be boarded onto the Hokusen Maru.  Since another POWs group had not completely arrived and their ship was ready to sail, Bruno's group was boarded onto the Arisan Maru in their place.  With him, were the same members of the 192nd who had worked with him at the Bachrach Garage Detail in Manila.  

    On October 11th, the ship sailed but took a southerly route away from Formosa.  The ship anchored in a cove off Palawan Island where it remained for ten days.  Within the first 48 hours on the ship, five POWs died.  The POWs managed to hook the ventilation system into the lights which brought fresh air into the hold.  When the Japanese discovered what had been done turned off the power.

    The Japanese conceded that unless they did something about the situation in the hold, more POWs would die.  The Japanese moved 800 POWs to the ship's first hold which was partially filled with coal. During the movement of the POWs, one prisoner was killed attempting to escape.  

    The stay in the cove resulted in the ship missing an air raid by American planes on ships in Manila Bay.  It is known that the ship was attacked once by American planes while in the cove.  The Arisan Maru returned to the Manila on October 20th.  There, it joined a convoy with eleven other ships.  

    On October 21st, the convoy left Manila and entered the South China Sea.  The Japanese refused to mark POW ships with red crosses to indicate they were carrying POWs.  This made the ships targets for submarines.  

    According to the survivors of the Arisan Maru, on October 24, 1944, at 5:00 pm, some POWs were on deck preparing the meal for those POWs in the ship's two holds.  The ship was near Shoonan off the coast of China.  Suddenly, there was a sudden jar which was caused by the ship being hit by two torpedoes.  The ship stopped dead in the water.  Two torpedoes had hit the ship in its third hold where there were no POWs.  It is believed that the submarine that fired the torpedoes was the U. S. S Snook.

    One of the Japanese guards took a machinegun and began firing at the POWs who were on deck.  To escape the fire, the POWs dove back into the holds.  After they were in the holds, the Japanese cut the rope ladders and put the hatch covers on the holds.  They did not tie down the covers.  The Japanese abandoned ship.

    Some of the POWs in the second hold were able to climb out and reattach the rope ladders into the holds.  They also dropped ropes down to the POWs in both holds.  All of the POWs were able to get onto the deck of the ship.  

    At first, few POWs attempted to escape the ship.  A group of 35 men swam to a nearby Japanese ship, but when the Japanese realized they were POWs, they were pushed away with poles and hit with clubs.  Japanese destroyers in the convoy deliberately pulled away from the POWs as they attempted to reach them.

    As the ship got lower in the water, more POWs took to the water.  Those POWs too weak to swim raided the ship's food lockers.  They wanted to die with full stomachs.  Many POWs attempted to escape the ship by clinging to rafts, hatch covers, flotsam and jetsam.  Five POWs found an abandoned lifeboat.  Since it had no oars and the seas were rough, they could not maneuver the boat to rescue other POWs.  These men stated that most of the POWs were still on deck even after it became apparent that the ship was sinking.   

    The exact time of the ship's sinking is not known since it took place after dark.  At some point, the ship split in two.  According to the surviving POWs, as evening became night, the cries for help became fewer and fewer until there was silence.

    Only nine POWs survived the sinking of the Arisan Maru.  Cpl. Bruno J. Pierotti was not one of them.  Since Cpl. Bruno J. Pierotti died at sea, his name appears on the Tablets of the Missing at the American Military cemetery outside of Manila.

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