MONTEREY - In June 1941, two Salinas natives - neighbors who grew up on Natividad Road - joined 105 other members of the Salinas-based 194th Tank Company for what was supposed to be a five-month tour of duty in the Philippines.

William Braye and Frank Muther, both 82, have done a lot together since then, but their experience on that long-ago tour of duty eclipses all others.

The tour turned into a 3 1/2-year ordeal in battlefields and prison camps in Bataan, the Philippines, during World War II. Only 47 of the company's original members would return.

"It was the greatest defeat in American history," Muther said of the battles and resultant capture of American troops by Japanese on April 10, 1942.

Braye, Muther and more than 40 other members of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor have come to the Monterey Peninsula to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the surrender of U.S. and Philippine troops to the Imperial Japanese Army.

The reunion at the Casa Munras Hotel in Monterey is an opportunity for the veterans, who come from seven different western states, to reminisce and honor their fallen comrades.

When the Japanese overran the Philippines, 70,000 soldiers were marched from their defensive positions to a prison camp 63 miles away.

The Bataan Death March had a devastating toll. About 10,000 soldiers died on the way, and others escaped to hide out in the dense jungles, where they fought the Japanese for three years.

Braye and Muther became Japanese prisoners of war.

Tuesday, Muther attended a luncheon at the Carmel American Legion Post 512. The luncheon included films and videos of their experiences.

Inhuman treatment

If the 63-mile march wasn't torturous enough, the living conditions as a prisoner of war were even worse.

"We only lost five in action during the march," Muther said. "The rest died in prison camps. They were bayoneted, decapitated and starved to death."

Scurvy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dysentery and diphtheria were common at prison camps.

Prisoners were placed in groups of 10. If anyone escaped, the remaining members would be executed and their heads would be impaled on bamboo poles as a barbaric warning.

Other torture included stringing men up by their thumbs.

Muther lived and worked at Osaka Camp No. 12, a Mitsui factory on the island of Honsua, with about 400 other prisoners of war. Braye spent 3 1/2 years at the Moji, Japan, prison camp, where he served as the camp's first sergeant.

"They took 200 of us out of the main camp in Manchuria," Muther said. "I ended up in a leather tannery, others ended up at a canvas factory, others went to a saw mill. All of us were literally slave labor."

The Japanese typically seized rations and medical supplies that Allied forces sent to prisoners of war.

"There was not one international law that they didn't break," said Melvin Routt, a former national commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor from 1995 to 1996. He was also at Osaka Camp No. 12. "A lot of us dropped down to 120 pounds."

`War's over boys'

The only positive thing to be gained from the experience was that it ended, and they survived, he said.

"Want to know how we knew the war was over?" Routt said. "There was a plane that circled real low over the prison camp and on the second pass, he threw something over.

"We all ran because we thought it was a bomb."

The "bomb" was a carton of cigarettes with the inscription: "The war's over boys; we're coming to get you."

The carton's contents were divided into 400 equal parts - and the war ended "just like that," said Routt, 77.

Company C officially inactivated in the Philippines on April 2, 1946, and returned to Salinas with only 47 of the original 105 members.

"I have no animosity toward the Japanese," Muther said. "They were soldiers and were doing what they were ordered to do."

As a gesture of postwar healing, Muther said his family, who owned a dairy farm on Natividad Road, leased 50 acres of land in 1946 to the Tanimura family, who were displaced and sent to internment camps during World War II because they were of Japanese descent.

The Tanimuras would go on to operate one of the Salinas Valley's leading produce companies.