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Diet was the same. It never changed. You still got the
rice and you never got any vegetables and stuff like that.
You never got it. Every now and then you might get one
little old piece of whale meat or something. Every night
you went to bed hungry. Every morning you woke up hungry.
There was nothing you could do about it.
You were just hungry and you had stomach pains and
everything else from not having enough food. You just
survive, that's all. You just made yourself do it. You
couldn't start to feel sorry for yourself or anything like
that because it would kill you if you did that. You just
act like you had a full 10 or 8 course meal and go on with
it. But we had no bread, just the rice and every now and
then they'd have a little greens. Now the ones that we got
in Japan were a little bit different.
We left Hitachi right after first of January ‘45. The next camp I
went to was Matsushima (CAMP
INFORMATION LINK 1) (CAMP
INFORMATION LINK 2). You didn't know where you were going or
what you're going to run into and, of course, what clothing you had
was you could put in a thimble. You had the apprehension of where
you're going, what are you going to do, and how you're going to end
up. You would do that all through the whole thing because it was
just like needles and pins all the time. When we went into the
camp, there were a hundred of us and they had prisoners from
Singapore and someplace else. They had a bunch of people from India
that's, well, I called them Sikes. Johnny Sikes. Then a short time
later they brought in a hundred of the ship's officers and crew of
the Exeter, the British ship that was sunk in the Coral Sea. They
brought all those into our camp so we had probably 500 or 600 in
that camp total.
They were in a barracks all to themselves. We were in a barracks
all to ourselves. Total number of Americans were about a hundred.
We built an electric dynamo plant all by hand. We had a river and
we dug out two big enormous holes through the mountain that diverts
the water through and then we dug the hole for the dynamo to go in.
And I had a nice job because of my leg. I couldn't quite stand up
to the hard work all the time. So I got to be a wench operator and
I'd go way up on top of a hill. A Jap guard was with me and I had
this wench up there that had four handles: forward, reverse, up and
down. All I could see was somebody down below, way down below on
the ground giving me signals to raise up or to come this way. The
wench was so weak that I had to wrap one leg around two of the
handles and, of course, they would weaken, you know, and it would
slip.
Well, my little pet thing at that time was when a pallet was
full of all that construction stuff, they'd give me the signal to
raise it up and put it across the river. Well, as soon as it would
get in the middle it would slip and down it would go and then I
would catch it before it hit the water. It jerked everything and
everything would fall off on it, see. And again, that Jap said, 'domy
domy da' meaning "no good, no good." And I did that as often as I
could.
So finally they got me off of that and put me down to where they
were loading, putting dirt in a cart and then taking it to the edge
of like a cliff and dumping all this stuff down there. And again we
would push it so hard and fast that it would hit the edge and tilt
over and over it would go. I don't know why they didn't execute all
of us because you could just see what we were doing but they never
even blinked an eye.
We had hope. Now that was the thing. If you gave up hope, then
you'd die because there's nothing else to live for then. But every
day was the end of the war, see, and you'd go day by day. At first
you'd say, well, we surrendered in May and by Christmas the
Americans are going to be here and get us out. Of course they never
made it so then it would be the 4th of July and then it would be
Christmas again. So it just kept you going all the time.
One day we look up, we heard this roar and we saw 11 B-29s. They
were way up there so they didn't drop any bombs or nothing so we
figured they were taking pictures. And so about a week later about
a hundred of them came over. Part of them hit us at where we were
working and of course everything that we were working, just tore it
all up.
So it was just no way that you could repair it and this was an
8-hour bombing. That was the first time that I had been under a
bombing of the B-29. I didn't think they could carry that many
bombs, but they tore that place completely up. And really for the
rest of the time, we just picked up a rock here and put it there.
Just very small stuff to do. Oh, listen, we enjoyed that bombing
because they had an oil storage site, I think Nagoya, Nagoya was
not to far from where we were, they'd blast that thing day in and
day out. And we could hear the explosions and the smoke rising.
They didn't bother our area that much because there was nothing
left. They just came over one time and just blew it up and that was
all of it. And so the rest of it was menial work here and there,
going out chopping wood for the camp.
Of course, the B-29s kept us pretty busy because we were out on
a detail and we would go out and pick up chopped wood and bring
wood into the camp. Then the air raid siren would go off and the
Japanese would holler ' benedgey coo, benedgey coo', which is
B-29!, B-29! and they'd take off. They'd leave us, our guards were
gone. Well, there's nowhere we are going to go in Japan. Where are
you going to go? So this was a little scary at that time because if
we go back to camp, then they're going to say, well, you couldn't
get off the island so you're trying to escape. So finally we said,
we'll just go back to camp and take our chances on it. We marched
in and, of course, the guards were at the gate. We march in you
know, really doing your military walk, you know, and salute as you
go by. We went right through and went back to the barracks and that
was the end of it. It was a little bit scary at that, you know,
because you didn't know what was going to happen if you go back.
The Japanese never said anything to us but we knew that with the
amount of planes that were coming over, every day it was increasing
more and more and you just knew that something was going to happen.
What got us though was that before the Japanese surrendered, they
changed some of the guards in our camp to what we called the
Imperial Guards. They were the ones from Mongolia or Manchuria. And
they're tall, they're much taller than the average Japanese so we
thought they were there to more or less protect us from the others.
We later found out that these were the ones that were going to
execute all of us if the Americans landed on Japan. That's what
they were there for. We thought they were kind of looking out for
our welfare which they weren't, you know.
None of the camps were ever marked in Japan with a "PW" on top
of the buildings. When the Americans hit Okinawa and took that
over, then after the Japanese surrendered, they were going to come
into Tokyo Bay. Everybody would fight. Everybody. Every man, woman
and child would have a weapon of some kind and they would fight.
The Americans, I understand, were going to invade, but the mass
force of seven million troops, which, no telling what the
casualties would be on the American side because that's a hard
place. There's no roads except maybe just a few roads. But the main
roads, like you'd have in any city, they don't have them. It's all
done by rail. So it would really be a tough thing. It'd be a long,
hard, drawn out affair.
Well, a typhoon hit at the time which delayed everything for two
weeks and they never did even tell us then. Of course, we knew it
was over with because this British fellow got a hold of a newspaper
and found out that the Emperor surrendered. But they never came out
and told us that the war was over with. But we never worked as much
and we stayed at camp more than we went out.
So we were wondering what was going on and we had a British
doctor who got a guy and says, well, make out like you're real
sick. And he went down to Japanese headquarters and told them that
he was real sick and he needed to get down to Tokyo or wherever the
Americans were so that he could take care of him. And they said,
no. They said we can't do that. Said he'll have to stay here. He
said, well, if he dies, that's going to be your responsibility.
That kind of shook them up a little bit. So they said, okay get him
ready and put him on a stretcher. They took him down to the train
station and put him on a train all by himself, no box car. This was
a passenger train. It took him all the way down to Tokyo and when
they got to where the Americans were, some of them had already come
into Tokyo Bay. He jumped up out of that stretcher, you know. and
he told them where our camp was located.
The USS Enterprise, they took six airplanes and loaded them up
c-bags with food, clothing, cigarettes, candy, just everything they
could put in there, and came over to our camp. And they'd peel off
and drop these c-backs full of food and everything else ,and, of
course, we all got sick as everything eating all that rich food.
But one plane, this one really stands out, this one peeled off and
came down and dropped his c-bag. We had a flag pole in the parade
ground and just luck is all it was, the parachute floated down and
hung right on that flag pole, see. And the Japanese, you could just
see their eyes, oh, boy. No wonder we lost the war.
But see, even when this was going on, we were still under the
Japanese. They were still in the camp. They still had the guards
and everything else. But when they dropped that food, they didn't
bother it. Then they came in and said, well, you're going to move
to a new camp. And, of course, in a way we knew something was up
then. But then again you didn't know for sure.
But we kind of had an idea because when we went down to the
train station we got on a passenger train. We got on it about 10
o'clock and rode until about almost 6 o'clock to the coast and we
went through this little town. And this guy was looking out and he
said, I think I saw a navy guy down there. It looked like he had a
bandoleer, two bandoleers across his chest and a sub Thompson
machine gun, you know. I said, oh, that's probably one of those yay
ho pole guys, you know, hauling something. And finally somebody
stuck his head in the back of car there and yelled, he says, "Hey
you guys, you want to go back to the States!"
Oh, gosh the feeling that you had, boy, was just like somebody
had 10,000 pounds on your shoulder and all of a sudden it was
lifted. You were just elated that you were free and people just
don't understand that if you don't have your freedom, what it
really feels like. It's just -- it's just bad. That's all it is. It
just holds you down and everything else. And boy, from then lifting
that weight and knew that the war was over with and that we were
free and that we were going -- that we were going to go home and
boy, you were just -- your smile was just moving your ears away.
You know, in other words you're smiling so wide, you know, that it
was really something though.
And boy, from then on, everybody just piled off the train. And
then they had the correspondents there. They got everybody from
each state and took our pictures and names and everything else.
They put us on a hospital ship, took us out in a landing craft.
And, of course, the waves -- you know, the tide was coming in and
here we were just drenched and all because the waves would splash
over the sides of the front of that thing. We got soaking wet.
We got out to the hospital ship and they took us in and we took
all of those old clothes that we had and threw them away. Took a
shower, deloused us. Gave us a brand new pair of shoes, dungarees
and the whole ball of wax and took us down to the galley and said,
eat what you want. All they had then was like fried eggs and
crackers. No butter or jelly. No coffee. But they had some cocoa.
So we had that. So I just says, okay. Just pile on. You'd eat it,
but it was so rich you'd go up topside and heave it over the side.
Go back down. I think I had something like 15 eggs, you know,
total. And then they said, we're crowded and all this but we have
cots and everything set up on the deck. We went up there and they
had the cot with a mattress on it. Big, thick mattress and a pillow
and cover and everything else. Boy, we just sacked out and that was
it.
And then the next morning they put us on a destroyer and they
had pancakes for breakfast and they didn't give us any examination.
They didn't check us. They didn't do nothing. We could eat anything
we wanted, which was really bad because the prisoners from Germany,
they put them on a strict diet and they were prisoners a lot less
than we were. I don't know how many pancakes I ate, but I ate until
I couldn't hold anymore. Then at noon time they had fried chicken
and you just gorge yourself, you know. And gosh, we're just sick as
a dog, you know.
Well, I think really what helped me out through prison camp was
the way that I was raised with mother through the Greek religion
and the food that we ate and everything else. I think that's what
really carried me through prison camp, that my body was already
acclimated for that and then it would take that punishment. Now, it
wouldn't take it forever. Maybe five years it wouldn't do it. Even
in the three and a half years that I doubt if I could have lasted
another six months because my ankles were giving away. I couldn't
hardly walk. And the malnutrition was really taking effect on you
because you could feel that your body just really wasn't -- wasn't
the same, you know. That you were just getting weaker and weaker by
the day. So I think that that's what really pulled me through was
just the way I was raised and the food that we had. You know, a lot
of olive oil and all that and they say that's one of the best
things in the world. That everything was fried in olive oil. Mother
would make confetties and of course her meatloaf and confetties
were, she'd take good round steak and she'd get two knives and chop
it up. You wouldn't buy hamburger. She wouldn't have hamburger for
nothing.
We made it down to Yokosuka and they put us on a ship, the
Ozark, they had us on a list to fly us back to the states. And the
day that our names came up to fly back, a bunch of Marines from the
new 4th division, came over and said, we want all of the old 4th
mariners out of Shanghai. They rounded up 125 of us, took us over
to Yokosuka, and they had the Marine Corp band there. They had
steaks. They had chicken. They had every kind of food you could
think of. We could have anything we want and could request any
music. Well, the music we knew was way back in the ‘40s. They
didn't even know them. But the climax was that they threw a full
battle dress parade for us. That's something that you don't get
until you serve 30 years in the Marine Corp and we got a full
battle dress parade. We had the commanding general there with us
and Clement's, who was the one who organized the new 4th.
And the irony of that was that when they organized the new 4th
division, they took the flag and the standard which is a Marine
Corp flag and kept them covered and encased. They made a vow that
they would not uncase those colors until they came to Japan and
liberated all of the 4th mariners and throw a big parade for us,
and that was what they did. They unfurled those colors and I think
that you could hear the uproar back in the States, you know. And
they went through that parade for us and everything. Well, you
cried really. Just no way that you could hold it back, you know.
Then after that was over with, we went back to the ship and they
said, well, we're going to put you on the list again but we're
going to leave in the morning for the States if y'all want to go
back with us on the ship. Well, I think I weighed a little less
than a hundred pounds at the time. I dropped from about around 155,
158 down to under a hundred pounds. So I said, well, it will give
me a chance to kind of gain a little bit of weight. Well, we left
Tokyo on the Ozark on September the 8th and arrived in San
Francisco in October-- so about 15, 16 days or so. But I think I
weighed, like I said, less than a hundred and as soon as we got off
the ship, went over to the naval hospital in Oakland and jumped on
a scale and I weighed almost -- I weighed a little over 170 pounds.
They fed us anything that we wanted, I looked like a balloon.
Nobody would believe that I came out of prison camp. I mean my
cheeks were full, you know, and it was terrible. It's a wonder it
didn't kill us all but they didn't give us any examination, no
pills, no nothing. Just fed us. The whole time your elbow moved,
your mouth opened up.
When we passed underneath the Golden Gate bridge, you know. We
said, well, here it is, good old San Francisco. We always called it Frisco. They
said, you don't call it Frisco, it's San Francisco. And they had the band, well,
the band greets every ship that comes in, see. And nobody met us after we
disembarked off the ship and all they had was the bus. We got on the bus to take
us to the hospital and they had a lady driver. Of course, they didn't have this
before and we just teased that poor girl to death, got her so rattled it was
terrible. We said oh, my gosh, we went through three and a half years of prison
camp and we're all going to be killed by a woman driver.
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