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In April of ‘44, we got orders that we were going to be
shipped to Japan. The Americans were starting to get a
little bit close to the Philippines, so they started
getting all of the able-bodied people out, putting them on
prison ships and shipping them to Japan.
We bundled everything up that we had which wasn't a
lot. But we boarded the train. They had the old box cars;
not like our box cars that we have here.
They're about a little less than half the size of our
box cars, but they would put 200 to 300 in a box car and
all you could do is sit there and fold your knees up and
put your chin on your knee and that's the way you had to
ride the whole trip. You couldn't -- of course, you couldn't go. There's no going to the
bathroom or nothing like that. It was all done right there. So we
went from there which was a short trip from Cabanatuan to Manila.
Of course it was an all day trip. So when you got to Manila you
were feeling pretty rough.
Then we went into Bilibid, which is where they -- all of the
guys that were seriously wounded, they couldn't do anything, that's
where they were. And we stayed there until the 27th, three days
later. Then from there we left, went aboard a cargo vessel prison
ship (PRISON
SHIP INFORMATION LINK) and they had a hole down there that we had 300 in our group
and they put all 300 of us in that one hole and we rode that way
all the way to Taiwan. It was like the box car, really. There was
just no space and if you were the last one to go down, you had no
place to sit. They all had to stand up and everybody was just so
cramped up you couldn't move. You couldn't go to the bathroom.
There was nothing, no way to do it so they'd lower buckets down
with water and if you got lucky enough to get some water where you
could. So you had the same problem. Your knees drawn under your
chin and that's where you sat and that's where you stayed. They
kept us down below and they let us come up on topside just once in
the morning and once in the afternoon because we didn't know where
we were going. We just thought maybe we were just going direct to
Japan. I was in kind of like the back corner. Because I got in
there maybe about halfway through, I did find a little space and I
just sat there. Just draw your knees up and put your head on your
knees and put your arms around your legs and that's how you sat.
And, of course, you sat there for so long you couldn't hardly --
when you did have a chance to stand up, you'd stand up and then
fall over again because of the cramps that you'd have.
But the ships were not marked and, of course, the Americans
didn't know what type of cargo they were taking or handling or
what, see. They had troops along in that ship right along with us,
the regular troops. From Taiwan to Osaka we had an American
submarine that fired two torpedoes at us and missed, of course. The
ship we went over on was very fortunate because the prison ship
before us and after were sunk by the American subs and with a great
loss of life. I think one of them had 1500 on and I think maybe
less than 500 survived. And we lost all of our officers on one,
they bombed that ship and the submarine sunk it and we lost every
one of them. We had a Navy fellow that said that we had two
torpedoes fired at us after we left Manila harbor. We were on two
ships, two prison ships and one of them was loaded with Japanese
troops going back to Japan. There was a prison ship and two
destroyers and one of the destroyers was sunk and torpedoed as we
left the harbor.
So we went back into the harbor and then the next morning we
started out again. Made it to Formosa and stayed there for a short
-- about not quite a week, but the Americans had just bombed
Formosa. The battle of Saipan and Guam was about to happen and when
we got in there the harbor was pretty well cleared. So we stayed
there too long as far as I'm concerned because all the Americans
were doing was waiting for that harbor to fill up again and then
they'd come back. So then we made it through and we had stormy
weather from there all the way to Japan and which I was thankful
for that because I said, no submarine can see us. And this navy guy
said, they don't need to see. All they got is sonar. They can just
use that and hit you with that.
We left March 24th, went aboard a Japanese prison ship and took
us three days to go to Taiwan, which is Formosa. Then we stayed
there until April the 2nd and then we sailed for Japan and went to
Osaka. We landed in Osaka on April the 8th.
We got off the ship in Osaka and it was snowing, great big old
snow flakes. So we went on to Hitachi and they had snow under
everything. It was cold. So that was in April of ‘44. So at that
time the Japanese issued navy uniforms to everybody. What they did,
they paraded us. We left Osaka and put us on a train and went to
Tokyo. They put us on display, marched us through Tokyo, said, oh,
we sunk another American ship. Here's the proof right here and
we've been prisoners for over two years. Just like Lindbergh in New
York. Everybody was on the sides, you know, hollering and all this
and that. It was a big thing, you know. Then we had to take off our
uniforms and go back into our prisoner of war clothes. Of course,
shoes, we didn't have shoes. I had to wire the soles together to
make them stay on. After a while they gave us their little, they
call them aerial tennis shoe. There's no toes except for your big
toe and the rest of your toes are just loose, like sandals. And we
left Tokyo, went up north to Hitachi which was a copper mine. We
got settled down there and went to work in a copper mine. (CAMP
INFORMATION LINK 1) (CAMP
INFORMATION LINK 2)
This particular camp, they had a whole bunch of the Chinese
prisoners. They'd been there for years. We couldn't tell in other
places where they had prisoners. But where we were, it was just the
300 of us that went into this particular area. The camp commander
with the interpreter would always greet you, and say, you know,
you're in camp and the Americans are losing the war. And then the
interpreter would say that anyone that escaped from this camp would
be shot with guns. That was a pet thing that they'd come up with.
We got settled down and had like eight people in a little hut.
Grass mats, they had those for a bed. And the darn mosquitoes,
fleas, and everything, you could just see them hopping all over. In
the wintertime there, when it got cold, they'd issue you like maybe
10 or 15 pieces of coke, which is like a coal, and you had a little
fire. A little pit in the middle of this thing. You'd fire that up
and for about an hour had a little heat. You froze for the rest of
the time because Hitachi was real, real cold. That temperature was
down below zero. Hitachi was way up north, so it was pretty cold
pretty much of the year. Of course, we had no -- not anything
heavy, not a heavy blanket of any kind. You had just a little old
light blanket. But then you couldn't have the thing over you
because the fleas in that mat would just eat you alive. You'd
bundle those fleas up like that, you can't sleep at night.
Everybody was sick too with diarrhea and you'd be going to the
bathroom at least 20 times a night. It was just up and down and try
to sleep and then you have to go again. You go to the latrines.
They had the latrines set up. You just get by.
And then, one time, they brought in a bunch of bones. They gave
them to us and what we do we just broke them and got the marrow out
of them and we would eat that. They'd eat the meat off of the bones
and give us the bones. That was nutritional in a way, you know.
Within three days, we were down in a copper mine. I worked 1200
and 1500 feet underground and each one had a different job to do. I
worked a drill to start with. They give you a six-foot drill and
then you'd keep it for a week and you'd go in there and find the
vein. Then you drill and they come and blast. The Japanese would
come on in and set the charge. Normally when you put the blasting
cap on to blow it up, you'd have a little crimping machine. Crimper
pliers that you'd crimp the edge so it would stay in the stick of
dynamite. He would stick it in his mouth and crimp it with his
teeth. So every time he did that, we all ran around the corner, you
know, trying to see if his head was going to splatter all over
everything.
You'd follow that vein until you ran out of it and then if
there's no more behind that, you'd go and they'd find a new one.
The Japanese civilians -- we were working with civilians in the
copper mining and the soldiers, of course, they didn't come down
there. The civilians were in charge over us down there and then
they'd meet us as we came up and take us back to camp. You'd start
digging and then you dig, dig, dig and first thing you know you've
got a great big hole. They never shored anything up and that's one
thing we all really feared, the cave-ins. The Chinese, a lot of
them were killed by cave-ins and ours seemed to withstand all of
it, even the blasting. But you could look up and see that stuff
hanging and you just knew somebody else was setting off a charge.
For your noon meal they'd give you like a cigar box with rice in
it. And by the time that you got ready to eat it at noon time,
well, being down in that humidity down there, it would sour. You
know, you tried to eat that stuff and it'd just make you sick.
Really wouldn't even be worth eating.
If we could get by with sabotage we would do it. Any time we
could sabotage anything we would. They never caught on. They would
blast and then we'd have to shovel all that over in a cart and then
the main chute would go down to the one that we'd dumped. Then it
would go up topside and then they'd haul it off from there. And
we'd start pushing that cart down there and really start running
with it and it would hit the edge of that thing, tip over, and the
cart and everything would fall down in the chute. Well, that would
tear it up for the rest of the day because they had to clean it out
and all they could say was domy da, domy da (phonetic), which is
"no good, no good." You know. But we did that all the time and then
we would, on the drilling there was all air compressor and you'd
shoot too much pressure to it and break the drills. Just anything
that you could do, but they never seemed to catch on. We were
having fun as far as that goes because we didn't know if they'd
take us topside and shoot all of us. But any time we could do it,
we did that.
The civilians didn't bother you. We would do just enough work to
get by and they could see that we were slowing down. So they'd give
us what they call a camara which is a contract and say if you do so
many carts per day, well, then you can quit and go back to camp and
rest. Well, we would do it real quick because we could quit at one
o'clock. We'd go down about 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning. So then
the next day, he'd give you more work to do, see. So then we said,
well, we'll slow it down. Working in a copper mine is like working
in a coal mine. You get dust and it's getting in your system and I
was getting you know, choked up. You just can't breathe hardly and
we didn't stay there as long as some of them did. Some of them
stayed there until the end of the war and they've got problems
today with the copper dust. It's just like coal dust. We're working
in the coal mines and a lot of them came up with TB and stuff like
that.
We were just lucky. We had no cave-ins and, of course, a lot of
guys would bang themselves up. Not getting out of the way of that
cart or somebody swinging a pick, you know, not hitting with the
pick to penetrate, but they'd knock them down or something. Just
minor injuries. But you didn't want to do it too often, you know.
They kept that thing going 24 hours a day and it was the old
anaconda mines that was in World War I. They were active until
1927, well they reactivated those things and all the shoring that
they had in there had all deteriorated and weakened. So it was
really a scary thing to go down there and see that what they were
doing.
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