We just kept going and day in and day out it was the same old grind.

At Cabanatuan, I had an opportunity to write cards -- they were already preprinted. Post cards is all they were. All you'd put on there, 'I am well, bad, or sick or this and that. And, of course, everybody says they are well and say hello to mother and dad and the family. So they just couldn't write, you know.

I weighed a hundred, about 158 pounds which was about my normal weight at that time. I went down to less than a hundred pounds. So we couldn't do much, you know. You didn't have the strength to do it. And, of course, working in the Philippines on that farm, you didn't really do heavy work. But once you went to Japan you did the heavy work there.

Each group had its own commanding officer, the army had two groups and the navy and the marines had one group. Of course, there were less of us than there were of them. And so each one had their camp -- their group commander and, of course, you had his exec. The same set up as if it was in civilian times. Of course, they got all of the best of the best, you know. And anytime food came into the camp, well, they'd get first choice on it and what was left, well, that's what we'd get, which, of course, was far and in between at that time.

When the war started, they sent a lot of that Red Cross stuff over at the time. I imagine the Japs used it up in their battles and other things. They fed their troops with it in China when they went into China and started their fighting over there since 1932. The Red Cross sent parcels during World War II and some of it got to us but most of it didn't.

My health was good other than my leg. Of course, my leg gave me a lot of trouble because it took me over a year for it to heal up, but then I had malaria about four times. Of course, we had no medicine to counteract the malaria.

Beriberi is in two forms. You had the wet beriberi which your body would accumulate and retain all of the liquid that's in your body. Everything, your head down to your toe, would swell double size. And then, of course, once it did that, it would crush your heart and kill you.

Now, what I had was the dry beriberi, that's where the oil in your joints dried up because of the malnutrition. Every time I'd move my legs, and knees, fingers, I'd get a squeak out of them because it was just the oil in your system was drying out. And of course, you had the diarrhea. Now, a lot of them would get the dysentery and then from that they'd catch malaria and then that would kill them. So you couldn't -- you couldn't do both. And the malnutrition would affect different people in different ways. Some, your hair would fall out. Some of them, your teeth would fall out. You'd go blind temporarily. So it just affect you in all different ways.

Whenever a new group would come in, the camp commander would come over and we'd all assemble and then he'd give you that speech, you know, about if you escape, we'll shoot you dead with guns, you know. But the commander didn't really associate at all with the prisoners. We always associated the Japs with Walt Disney characters. Mortimer Snerd because of his facial features that he had. He looked just like Mortimer Snerd and, of course, they wore glasses. You know, they had the big bifocals. We'd call them four eyes and they didn't know what we were talking about. If they ever did, why that would just be curtains for you. Did it under our breath. But we had nicknames for all of them really. but most of them, they were just flat mean people.

Inside the camp, I would say you were all right unless that you messed up somewhere and then the Japanese would catch you. If you tried to escape, of course, why then they would execute you and at one time they had 10 men squads and if one would escape, they would execute the other nine. And, of course, we had to watch each other day and night to be sure none of them would take off. There was no place to go. There was 40 miles to the mountains. That's where the guerrillas were holding out. But then the Filipinos would turn you in because the Japanese put a reward out that if you caught one or saw one. It was just too hard to do really. You didn't know the country.

The Japanese were losing their first-line men, quite a few were being killed out. So what they did, they got a bunch of these Taiwanians from Formosa and made guards out of them. Then the wounded ones out of China that couldn't fight anymore, they made guards out of them. So these Taiwanians were young kids, you know, and they just gloat like I don't know what, see. Of course, you had to salute them and bow and all this jazz. So then towards the end, why, it just got thinner and thinner all the time. They even took some of them and put them in the fighting areas. So then you really started getting the scum, you know. Just beat you just for no reason at all, if they could do it and they did that quite a bit.

We had a lot of talent in the camp and like on Sunday they'd make up a show and had some comics in there. The guys were pretty good on their jokes . In fact, on Sundays even the Japanese would come over and watch it. They'd put on a pretty good show, you know. They'd dress up as they could. Some of them dress up like the gals and do the hula dance and all this and that so it was pretty good.

We had chaplains of all our denominations. You go to church on Sunday, go to mass. So they had that set up to where you could have the religious portion of it. They didn't interfere with that because they don't have any religion of their own except the Buddha's, you know. But it was mainly just same old thing, day in and day out.

One time the Japanese showed us a movie of Pearl Harbor which it's almost the exact thing of Tora, Tora, Tora. It's the same scenes and the whole jazz and they would show Japanese shooting down American airplanes and these Japs would say hooray. So it got to the point we'd see an American shooting the Japanese down then we'd all start hollering, you know, not knowing how they would take it. And Judy Canova, they showed us movies of Judy Canova until we were sick of it. They just loved it.

But Sunday was one of our afternoon outings that we'd go down to the barracks where the dentist had set up. Everybody that had toothaches and tooth problems would go down there and we used to watch them just take a pair of regular pliers and pull teeth with it. And I guess that's one thing I really hated or feared the most is having a toothache because it was really bad. We had navy doctors but they couldn't do anything. Didn't have anything to do it with. Now, we've had people who had appendicitis and navy doctors would take a razor blade and take the appendix out with that. And, of, course the Japanese, they all claimed to be doctors themselves. They loved to do it too. But they'd cut you up so they'd just never would find the appendix anyway.

So all in all, I took care of myself. I ate what came out of our mess. I didn't eat anything that was -- if you go on a work detail outside and pick up anything, you don't know how it's made or what's in it. A lot of them did that and a lot of them got sick.

You know, it just got tiresome and, of course, in the eating part, you know, where you had rice, rice, and rice. Well a lot of these guys would catch a dog or something and then kill that dog. Cook that dog up and eat dog. I never could. I was hungry but I never got that hungry. They had the snakes. Somebody would go out on a work detail and catch one, they would bring it back to camp and skin that thing and fix it up, you know. You could hide it because they didn't search you when you came in off of a work detail. The only time they really searched you is when you came into a camp and when you left.

You just do what you can. And, of course, we all had diarrhea so bad that we had no paregoric to combat that. So some guy came up and said, you need some roughage. He said, burnt wood will do it. So the galley would finish fixing the rice. We had a big old cauldron, looked like a World War I helmet only it was probably four foot across. And we'd tell him, burn that rice. Burn it at the bottom, you'd eat that and that would give you some roughage and in addition to that, you would take the wood and as the wood burned, it curls up, you know. And you just break it off and you just chew that and eat the burnt wood.  (continue)