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6.21.99 By Brian D. Mockenhaupt |
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Antonio Dattorro could feel himself slipping. The artistry that had come so easy to him for so many years was fading, crowded out by nightmares. This project would be the last time he picked up a paint brush. This would be his epitaph. It was 1983. In charcoal and oil paints, he laid down the worst part of his life -- the murderous forced-march through the jungles of the Philippines and the more than three years spent in Japanese prison camps during World War II. "I wanted to tell the story, what a thing we went through," says Dattorro, now 80. "I don't know why God did that to me, left me alive while hundreds died." He has not painted or drawn since he finished the project nearly 15 years ago. His memory comes and goes and his physical and social skills are in disarray, a product, doctors say, of post traumatic stress disorder. But the story of Dattorro's life is still clear and stark and cruel, told through the skeletal men and dead bodies heaped onto the canvas. His artwork depicting the Bataan Death March and his years as a prisoner of war is now on display at the Rhode Island National Guard Command Readiness Center in Cranston. In a ceremony there last month, Dattorro was awarded the Rhode Island Cross, the state's highest recognition for heroism and bravery. Bataan survivors James Brennan and Henry Wallace of Pawtucket were also awarded the cross. John LeClair and John Portress, also of Rhode Island, received the award posthumously. Dattorro had previously been awarded two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. The Bronze Stars are for acts of bravery during combat from Dec. 7, 1941, to May 10, 1942. The Purple Hearts are for Dattorro's battered, broken body. He had enlisted in the Army Air Corps, serving in Hawaii and Australia before shipping to the Philippines. For the first year there, his life was stable, quiet. He was an artist, painting those flashy pictures on the noses of fighter planes and bombers. In a telegram sent to his brother, reported in the Providence Journal in December, 1941, Dattorro said he was doing well and that the Filipino people were being protected. "Don't worry," he said. But the situation deteriorated rapidly and within three months, Dattorro would be marched at gunpoint to troop transports that would carry him to Japan. Hours after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they began an attack on Allied positions in the Philippines. The American and Filipino soldiers were slowly beaten back and in April, 1942, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was ordered to Australia to take over as commander of the Pacific theater. Before he left the Philippines, proclaiming,"I shall return," he ordered the soldiers to defend the island. Retelling the history, Dattorro kneels on the floor of his North Providence condominium and shows how he manned a machine gun, preparing for the Japanese assault. The Allies, running out of food and medicine, held off the Japanese for a short time but were soon forced to surrender. About 75,000 soldiers were captured. What came next is recorded in Dattorro's artwork. One large, charcoal drawing shows soldiers walking at gun point. The panel is divided into narrow vertical sections with prisoners marching under the sun, then under the moon, the sun, the moon, the sun. They marched through the night without food, and if they stopped or sat down, Japanese soldiers often shot them or ran them through with bayonets. Thousands died on the 65-mile march. The survivors were eventually loaded onto transports and shipped to prison camps in Japan. More prisoners died along the way as several of the Japanese ships were sunk by American planes and submarines. In the camps, prisoners were worked through the day, sometimes to death. Dattorro can still recite clipped phrases from his Japanese vocabulary Ñ Hurry up! Come here! Stupid! His paintings show skeletal figures packed together, men laboring in fields, guards shooting prisoners, rats eating dead bodies. The story on Dattorro's body mirrors the story in his art. While he was working in a rice field, Japanese soldiers jumped on his back, breaking it. His front teeth were knocked out with a rifle butt. There's a dent on his forehead from another rifle blow. He has a long scar on his forearm from being stabbed with a bayonet. A friend in the camp stitched the wound shut with needle and thread. "I was broken all over," Dattorro says. What saved him, he is convinced, is his Italian heritage. Dattorro was befriended by a Japanese guard who also spoke Italian. "That's why he liked me. He told the others 'Don't touch this guy, he's not American, he's Italian.' " As friends continued to die and American planes bombed cities across Japan, life in the work camps dragged on. But on August 6, 1945, something strange and startling happened: a giant bomb exploded in the distance and the Japanese abandoned the camp. Dattorro and other prisoners left the camp and headed to the nearest city. They were in Hiroshima two days after the explosion of the first atomic bomb used against an enemy. "You can't believe it. Whoever was killed was cooked. "You can't explain it," he says, gesturing with his arms. Poles, trees, buildings flattened. "The fire..." Dattorro says. On Aug. 16, a group of prisoners commandeered a train and made their way to freedom. Dattorro was going home. When he enlisted in the Army, he weighed 170 pounds. By the time he was free, nearly four years after being taken prisoner, he had withered to 86 pounds. After the war, the survivors were brought to San Francisco for rehabilitation. A family wasn't notified until the government was sure their son was going to live. Dattorro waited until he was back in Providence to tell his parents. "My dad's family didn't know he was alive until the day he showed up on their door step and said 'Hi, mom. I'm home,' " says his son Anthony Dattorro. After the war, Dattorro married and settled into an everyday life. He earned a master's degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he later taught drawing and painting. For many years he ran a successful art gallery in Providence. He was also responsible for building up the art program at Hope High School and other public schools in Providence. In recent years, many people have told Anthony that his father was responsible for getting their children out of the ghetto and into college. During that time, little was said of the war, and his family knew very little about their father's experiences overseas. "He didn't inflict that on his family," Anthony Dattorro says. "I knew my dad was a POW, but he spared us that." Dattorro pushed everything from the war into a dark recess of his mind. But it was always, always there. "I used to have to dream about it every night," Dattorro said. He would get nervous before going to sleep, knowing the dreams would come. He would wake up during the night, not knowing where he was. Then he would walk to the boys' rooms and stand outside, listening to them sleep, to bring himself back from the nightmare. By the early 1980s, a few years after his wife died, the war had seeped from Dattorro's dreams into his waking life and he began suffering from Alzheimer-like symptoms. On his birthday in 1983, he began recording the visions in his head. "I think he knew it was coming to a close," his son says. "He wanted people to know. "After he finished that he was done. He was losing his skills." Now Antonio lives with Anthony. His other son, John, lives in California. A nurse comes to the house during the day to help Antonio. Though she raises his spirits, he is frustrated when he can't remember names, words, places. "What I went through, I should have been dead," says Dattorro. "You can't believe what they did to us. I don't know why I didn't die." There is not a day, Dattorro says, when he does not think of the march and the camps and his dead friends. "At my age now, I'm ready to die," he says. "I wish I could die." * * * The artist explains "I have decided to tell my story, about me, when I was a soldier during World War II -- U.S. Army Air Corps. I will tell my story, not in words, but in pictures [paintings and drawings]. The pictures will emphasize my prisoner of war days, and how I have been cursed and stuck with the tragedy of remembrance. "We, who have survived to endure the suffering during our internment and later to face up to the normal tragedies that happen to all of us in our lifetime and be forced to a continued life of loss, are the unlucky ones. The lucky ones are the soldiers that died in the beginning of the slaughter. "I have been painting and drawing for thirty years, and have never had the desire to paint or draw pictures about that portion of my life. Now, I feel I must. Not only for me, but for all the survivors and the dead, and also to give me a reason for having existed." * * *
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