Major Marshall Hurt was not having a good morning. Around midnight, he and Colonel Everett Williams, both bachelors on Major General Edward King's staff, had volunteered to try to find a Japanese officer who would accept the surrender of King's 75,000 American and Filipino defenders of the Bataan peninsula.
The next hours of the Battle of Bataan were filled with noise and confusion. “The roads were jammed with soldiers who had abandoned arms and equipment in their frantic haste to escape from the advancing Japanese infantry and armored columns and the strafing planes overhead,” wrote Louis Morton in his book The Fall of the Philippines (1953). At 2 a.m. on April 9, 1942, Filipino and American troops who had been trapped on the Bataan peninsula of the Philippines' Luzon island for three months began exploding their TNT storehouses and hundreds of thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition and artillery shells to keep them out of Japanese hands. Adding to the chaos, just before midnight a severe earthquake had rumbled through the area.
Leaving at 3:30 a.m., on a schedule they hoped would put them on the front lines about dawn, the two officers headed north on Bataan's East Road against a tide of what Hurt later described as “crouching, demoralized, beaten foot soldiers” fleeing south. Their route led “past blown-up tanks, burning trucks, broken guns.” Their car soon became useless.
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