SIPPERS OF SOUP AND EATERS OF RICE
or
Seven Prunes For Me, So Far

Christmas 1944
I talked with God the night before last;
He said to me, “What have you to ask?”
I said, “Only this and the answer would kill
all the wild rumors that pester this Phil –
“How long will it last? When will it end?”
God answered with haste, “Wakare masen. ”
Written by Harry Rodenburg
December, 1944

This poem, taken from the diary, is in italics, as is every diary entry in this document. Anything in italics is taken verbatim from the LECTURE NOTE BOOK diary that Harry kept hidden for nearly four years from the Japanese Gonzaga – the Jap soldiers who were returned from the front and were given the assignment of guarding American prisoners like Harry and his fellow POWs. Everything else is verbatim from the oral history he created in the early seventies on audio-tape, marginally supplemented over the past several years, in his own voice

This is a biographical sketch of my history and the experiences of myself, Harry Rodenburg, made for the purpose of acquainting my children, and possibly their children, with the history and the experiences that I went through during the War in the Pacific in World War Two, and also to acquaint them with their background so that they know who they are.

FROM HOLLAND TO HARVEY
My parents were Willem and Tryntja Rodenburg, They came from Holland as immigrants to the United States in 1905 with three children. I was born December 8, 1917, in Harvey, Illinois. At that time, we lived on Halsted Street in North Harvey.

My father had been born in Schedam, in Holland. He was a tough old bird. He had sailed with the Dutch Army in the Indonesian Islands. He was injured in a barracks accident there. I believe they had been playing grab-ass, and at the top of the bedpost was a spike. He was pushed by a fellow soldier, and ended up with that spike in his voice box. The doctor discharged him as disabled, but told him that with his physique, he should live to be a hundred years old. He almost made it; just 17 years shy of the mark at 83. When the car didn’t run, he rode his bicycle all the way up to Pullman to go to work, where he worked for a long time for International Harvester McCormick Deering building cultivators. Even at the age of 65 or 70, he occasionally rode a bicycle all the way down to Kankakee. He did not care for falderal, and did not attend my wedding in 1953.

My mother had been born in Gronigen, a northern province of the Netherlands as a member of a “schipper” family named Stallinga. The Stallingas owned and lived aboard their vessel. The vessel happened to be in Gronigen when Tryntje entered this world. The home port for the family was in Delft, Netherlands. She was a genuine sweetheart, an angel; she was quirky and endearing and made friends wherever she went. She was dearly loved by all who knew her. She died at 64 or 65, before 1953, anyway, and also missed the wedding.

I was born in Harvey, Illinois on December 8, 1917 and lived in Harvey until I was twelve or thirteen years old when my father bought a farm in Crete Township, Will County, Illinois. We moved to the farm in 1931, and I remained on the farm until the beginning of 1939, when I enlisted in the Marines. Willem bought the farm because he wanted to farm a larger tract than he was farming in Harvey. As farmers, we were really trying to learn the game as we went. Willem would go through the fields after we had picked green beans, and whenever he found a bean accidentally overlooked, he would say, “Vat’s de metter vis dis one?” I spent my time working on the “truck farm” and driving up to Chicago and the surrounding area selling the vegetables that we grew on the farm. We grew and sold carrots, cabbage, sweet corn, pumpkins, onion sets. We raised the best musk melons: Honey Rock.

My mother was a devout, solid, Christian woman, and there was a Christian Reformed church for Hollanders in Munster, Indiana that she would truck all her children to from out on Bemes Road. Except my father, who was a skeptic, so he didn’t go along. There were ten of us altogether. So many that my older sisters were already in their twenties and married by the time I remember knowing them. One of my older sisters, Peternella (I), had been killed by a train sometime in the twenties when she was eleven or twelve, so I never knew her. But my parents named another of my sisters Peternella (Nel Thiery) after that. A complete list of my siblings follows: Ann (Wick), Herman, Peternella (I), Dora (Crosby), William, Peter, Wilhemina (Min Glover), Peternella (II) (Nel Thiery), myself, Josephine (Dilts), and Mart (Morrell).

In 1939, I was twenty-two. I saw joining the marines as a way to get away from the farm and to set out and make my way. So I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was transported to San Diego, California for my boot training. I thought joining the Marines would give me a chance to “see the world.” In that respect, I was surely not disappointed.

SAN DIEGO
I went through my boot training in San Diego, a period of about sixteen weeks and after that I was selected to go to radio training school, which was a period of about twenty weeks. After graduation, I and three other Marines were sent up to the naval radio station at Point Loma for further training. While at the station, we were used, I thought, (and so did the others of course), in an unfair manner. We worked all night long, and then after a few minutes or an hour after we got in bed in the morning, we would be roused and told we had garbage detail. We would have to go out and collect the garbage and put it on the trucks. Then we would be allowed to go back to sleep.

Part of our duty had to do with trucks that were supplied by the Navy. We went down to the Naval supply station and loaded lumber, nails, and tarpaper onto the trucks and carried them to where the commander of the Naval station was building himself a home. Quickly we figured out that he was stealing these supplies from the Navy. When that became clear to me, I went down to the commanding officer at the Marine Corp. and told him what was happening. This caused a great tumult, and rather than being rewarded for that, or the Navy Commander being punished, the four Marines at the Naval radio station were shipped out to China! First we were given a thirty-day furlough. So I left San Diego, came home to Crete. On the way, I ran into a conman in Phoenix, who called over to me, “Hey, Marine, where you going?” When I told him “Chicago”, he said he was too, and that since we had some time, we should go take a look at Phoenix, walk around and see what it looks like. I ended up missing the bus, and playing him double or nothing for the little cash that was left in my pocket.

When I left Crete I went back to San Francisco to board a ship to China.

TEINTSIN: I
At that time, in 1939, going to China didn’t seem like a bad idea. In fact, everybody kind of wanted to go, as there was a lot of money in it; nor were we at war with anyone. Since American money was very valuable to the Chinese, this resulted in a very favorable exchange rate when dollars were converted into Chinese mex. So being in China could be a very profitable proposition.

The ship we boarded in San Diego was the USS Henderson. This had been an Army troop transport, but it had been turned over to the Navy. It was a rather old ship but in good condition. We stayed on that ship forty-four days, and I enjoyed almost every single one of them. Not all of the days were used in steaming. Some of the time

we laid over in Hawaii and also in Guam, the Philippines and also at one port in China. Our path was through Qinghuangdao, to go to Tientsin, our ultimate destination. In Qinghuangdao, there was a little storefront, kind of a general store, run by a little Chinese man. It was called Tee-tee Wong’s. We would sit there at Tee-tee Wong’s and drink beer and eat Vienna Sausages out of a can along with soda crackers.

I was a member of the Third Battalion of the Fourth United States Marines, also known as the China Marines. The majority of 3rd Batt. 4th Marines was stationed in Shanghai. I was only in Shanghai briefly, but I remember it as a beautiful place.

Not all of us went to Tientsin. Some of us went to Tientsin and some went to Peking. I was one of those who went to Tientsin. We went to a medieval-looking castle. It had previously been a German embassy and had places for troops to sleep and live. They were quite adequate.

QINGHUANGDAO
Being a radio man in Tientsin, I didn't do too many other soldier duties. I worked in a radio station and frequently worked all night long, listening to the radio and taking messages. After serving there for some time, I was told I was going to be sent to Qinghuangdao back south along the coast about 175 miles, which was near the place we landed when we first entered China.

When I served in Qinghuangdao, there were twenty Marines and two of them were radio men. I was junior radio man there. We lived about a mile from the city, a small city for China -- I guess about forty- or fifty-thousand people -- and

there were also forty-thousand troops stationed close by. The duty at Qinghuangdao itself was quite pleasant, at times almost monotonous. There weren’t that many people there, and the duty was not very strenuous. I acted as radio operator.

Of course, at that time, China was being invaded by Japan. The Japanese had control of Qinghuangdao. We were allowed to be there, for the Japanese were not at war with us, or the British, the Germans, or Italians -- only with China. The Japanese at that time were being resisted by the Communist Army, which ultimately became the rulers of China when Chiang Kai-shek was overthrown.

Qinghuangdao was near the Wall, possibly fifty miles away (I don't remember exactly). I say it seemed like fifty miles because of the time it took us to get from Qinghuangdao to the Wall. On occasion, we would get a truck, a half dozen or so of us, and drive to the Great Wall. There were only unimproved roads (or no roads at all) and no bridges on the way. We drove through creeks to get there. When we got there, we saw a monument on which a great many people had scratched their names. One I especially noticed -- it was kind of chiseled in there -- the name of Benito Mussolini. I believe, and without any proof of it, that Mussolini had also visited here.

We could walk to the Wall, and there was a monastery with Chinese monks who lived in the monastery and made wine and they sold some to us. So that's what we did! We bought some wine and generally had a nice picnic day. Later, we were advised to get back and get out of the area before nightfall came. At night, the Communists ruled and conditions were quite unpredictable. If the Chinese caught, say, a Japanese soldier out there, they would cut off his head and bury his body in the sand. We didn't want to take any chances; we didn't know what they would have done to us, and we didn't want to find out. So we got back in the truck and got back to Qinghuangdao.

We were told that if we walked a distance of about five miles from the camp, we could find good hunting for bustard, which is a large bird in the goose family. One morning, Griffin and I got up early, before daylight, and started to walk the railroad tracks toward the hunting place. There was a long bridge that didn't have much water under it; although at one time, apparently, it did have a good deal of water under it because the bridge was close to a quarter of a mile long. We walked in the darkness on that bridge, fifty to a hundred feet. Suddenly Griffin stopped and said to me, "Do you hear what I hear?"

I heard some kind of rumbling noise approaching, and said, "You bet I do!"

We ran off the bridge as fast as we could go. We jumped off the bridge onto a sand embankment along the railroad, and as soon as we had done that, a train went flying by, going very fast, no lights, terribly dark.

We sat there for a while, and Griffin said to me, "Well, we want to go hunting, don't we?" I said, "Yeah, we want to go hunting." So we got back on that bridge and tried it again. We got a couple miles beyond the bridge to a point where the woods came close to the railroad, and we could smell a very strong odor of cordite -- gunpowder. The train, by the way, was run by the Japanese because they were in control of the countryside. We figured this train that had passed was attacked by the Communists as it went through these woods. About a half hour later we were walking down the railroad tracks in the same area, innocently, you might say, but without incident.

We got to the place where we expected the bustard to come and fly in at daylight and we sat there and waited. It came to be beyond daylight, but nothing came. When it was quite evident that nothing was coming we said, "Let's go back." We decided that to walk along the railroad tracks would not be the safest way to go, so we walked along the shore of the bay – it could be Chee Dee Bay, I'm not quite sure of the name. But we had pleasant things to do as we walked. We shot birds, we found different things washed up on the beach, and we were getting fairly close back to the area about where the Chinese Communists had attacked the train.

When we got to that point we suddenly found ourselves walking right into a Japanese field patrol! They weren't out there just walking around. They were hunting for their enemies. They had machine guns, some had what seemed like a tripod, others had other parts of the machine gun, and some were carrying the ammunition. They had

camouflage on their helmets. When they saw us walking amongst them, they were as amazed as we were! We were stunned that we could walk amongst them and not be molested. They probably thought the same thing, thinking, "These Americans don't know what they're doing!" All we had were shotguns on our shoulders. They didn't harm us, nor did they try to stop us. We walked right through the formation and kept going toward our camp. And we made it back to our camp without incident.

After serving a number of months in Qinghuangdao, I contracted a serious disease. There were no American doctors there and no sick bay. Apparently, I had a high fever, so they sent me to Kalon Mining Company hospital which was a British-owned mining company and they had their own hospital there -- only one doctor, no white patients, mostly all Chinese, except for me. The doctor's name was Hope Gill -- he had a name just like a woman's. I went in there. I really don't know anymore what came first, pneumonia or typhoid, but one came after the other. I was in there for a number of weeks, maybe more than a month. I had become seriously ill. But, of course, typhoid and pneumonia were serious, certainly in those days, anyway. There were no miracle drugs, and if you survive, it's by luck. I guess I had run about a 106 fever day after day. It had caused serious damage to my interior. (continue)

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