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And then we got one Red Cross parcel, I think, while we
were there. It was an 8-pound box and, of course, when we
got that it had some cigarettes in it and some canned ham
and butter and stuff like that. Of course, we ate that up
pretty fast, you know. That was it.
Of course, they kept all of that anyway because when
they had the big earthquake in the 1900's, the United
States Red Cross sent all of that food over there to them.
They just put it in a warehouse and saved it for all those
years.
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.
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