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© Jess Montgomery
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
I HIRED OUT TO FIGHT
THE MILITARY HISTORY
of
WILLIAM H. MONTGOMERY
CAPTAIN, ARMY, UNITED STATES 0890270
For The Period
November 1927 - Nov. 1947
Star Route, Box 39
Cloverdale, Oregon, 97112
February 16, 1972

"I HIRED OUT TO FIGHT”
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Page
No.
CHAPTER I THE WAR BEGINS 1
The Attack on Clark Air Base 1
The Move to Bataan 11
CHAPTER II A BACKWARD LOOK 15
March Field, 1927 16
About Flying and Getting Scared 26
Promotion 28
Kirtland Air Base 31
CHAPTER III CLARK AIR BASE, PAMPANGA, P.I. 34
The Philippine Archipelago 40
CHAPTER IV BATAAN 41
New Years at Cabcabin, 1942 41
Bataan Air Field #1 44
Decision
CHAPTER V THE BATTLE OF BATAAN 47
Introduction to the Infantry 48
The Front Lines 54
A New Command Post 63
Malabit 67
Scrounging for Food 74
Japanese Attack 76
Hospital No. 1, Little Baguio 82
Capitulation 85
The Road Out of Bataan 88

Page 2 Contents
CHAPTER VI CAMP 0' DONNELL 91
Introduction to Prison Life 91
CHAPTER VII CABANATUAN 98
Rice-Rice-Rice 103
Trip to Davao 105
CHAPTER VIII DAVAO PENAL COLONY, MINDANAO 108
Dapeco Hospital 114
Our Captors 119
Escapes 122
Prisoner Morale 127
Some Fellow Prisoners 128
Social Life 131
Doctors and Diseases 135
Prison Routine 137
CHAPTER IX DAVAO TO MANILA 140
CHAPTER X BILIBID PRISON, MANILA 145
S. 0. Q. 149
Gifts From Home 152
More Fever 154
Food at Bilibid Prison 156
Starvation and Disease 159
Wheeling and Dealing 162
CHAPTER XI A PROMISE OF LIBERATION 167
New Arrivals 170
Ill Fated Prison Ships 176

Page 3 Contents
CHAPTER XII LIBERATION 183
Goodbye to Bilibid Prison 187
Evac Hospital, Santo Tomas 189
Quezon Hospital 194
Air Evac 197
Leyte 198
Pelelieu 199
Biak, Tarawa, Hawaii 200
CHAPTER XIII HOME AGAIN 202
Letterman General Hospital 202
Torney General Hospital 204
Santa Ana Regional Hospital 208
Bushnell General Hospital 209
Madigan General Hospital 210
APPENDIX
Calendar of Events 214
Letter from Colonel Guy Stubbs, CAC 216
Letter from Lt. Colonel John L Martin, Inf. 217
Report of Medical Disposition Board 218

INTRODUCTION
This is the story of my life in the
military service of the United States. I began
living it in 1927 but I did not really begin
writing it until 1953. The chronicle I began
in March of 1953 was written for my son, then
a lad of 5 years. In later years, it was
revised, expanded, edited. After the death by
cancer of my first wife, Florence Waechter
Montgomery, the manuscript was put away. When
I was remarried to Florence Ruth Montgomery,
she urged me to begin work once again on the
episode that was probably one of the most
important of my life. Her gentle urging and
patience has made this manuscript possible. I
do not feel that it has any exceptional
distinction as literature but it is the true
story of one man's war.
I had access to the diary I kept during the Bataan
campaign and during a portion of prison camp life. That diary is
an appendix to this document.
The letter I wrote my son, Jess Peter Montgomery, as a
prelude to telling the story of my military career follows as a
part of this Foreword. My son and I both will have to
acknowledge that it was the effort of Florence Ruth Montgomery,
my present wife, who really made its publication possible.
- - - - - - -
474 Terrace Street
Escondido, Calif.
March 23, 1953
"Dear Jess: I am going to try to write you a general
account of the happenings and experiences that befell me during
a period of several years (1941-45) while I was a soldier in the
Philippine Islands. I have postponed relating these events for
some time now. I had thought that, by practice and organization,
it could be made into a piece of literature. My lack of skill in
painting a picture of human character and in dramatizing the
course of human events has convinced me that if I am to write
this story at all, I had better be at it.
As Ben Franklin said in his diary to his son, 'A diary
gives an old man a chance to talk about himself.'
This period of time of which I will speak was a very
dramatic one in my life. Aside from my love for your Mother, it
was the most dramatic thing in my life. I do not look upon it

with anger or horror or repugnance. It taught me much about
life. Certainly, I do not look upon our captors, the Japanese,
with any rancor or blame. The curious set of circumstances that
led me through 14 years of Army experience to the threshold of a
useful career in the Army and plunged me, with 22,000 others,
into a nightmare of hunger and privation, fascinate me no little
bit. Why was, for instance, my friend and long time Army buddy,
Dave Miller, chosen instead of me to go to Officer's Candidate
School not a month before we were sent from Kirtland Air Base at
Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Philippines. By seniority, I
should have gotten that assignment. Dave was a capable boy and
he had something I lacked. At any rate, he was relieved from the
outfit and graduated a Second Lieutenant while we were enroute
overseas. He served well and efficiently at a Texas Air Base for
the next 4 years. After I was returned to the States, Dave
visited me for a few moments in the hospital in Palm Springs,
California. He was on his way to a station in the Caribbean Sea.
He was a major and up for another promotion. I was still a First
Lieutenant. He had his health. He had been with his family those
hard years. The War was almost over and he had a soft billet. It
looked like a case of Fate in all its devious workings. Within a
month after Dave left San Francisco, we got word he had been a
passenger in a B17 that had struck a mountain at Port-au-Prince,
Trinidad. He was killed instantly. Life is a curious thing. I
had not envied Dave his luck before. More than ever, I was
convinced that there is no way to add up the rules of human
existence into a work- able pattern of results. Each individual
plays his small part the very best he can. The important thing
is that he play hard and to the limit of his ability. As the
boys on my ball teams used to say, 'If you play the game hard
enough, the score takes care of itself.'
Be that as it may, we will go on from here with our
story."
- - - - - - -
I ask that you accept this account as wholly personal.
Certainly many of my compatriots saw it in a far different
light. I do not think it is worthwhile to go into the details of
many of those long, hot, hungry days. Most of them were just
that and nothing more. One day ran into another. We saw the same
faces. We slept each night on the same space on the hard, wooden
floor.
We had the same food twice each day -- rice, sometimes
cooked with 3 parts water to one of rice and sometimes 6 parts
water to one of rice. This last was known as Lugao. Each kind of
rice, Lugao and Cannin, had its devotees. It was still rice. In

addition to this, we usually had a "soup" made of a watercresslike
weed that grew along the canals. I thought it something
like spinach until I tasted spinach again after my return to the
U.S. I was amazed to find that spinach had such a delicious
flavor. So, we can say we had rice and soup twice each day. At
first, for the first year or so, we had a very good issue of
rice, almost a pound and a half each. As time went on and the
supply became shorter, we were cut down little by little. We
used to speak of the "good old days" when we got a pound of rice
each day. That was dry measure and was issued in kilos. Later on
we talked of the "good old days" when we got three-fourths of a
pound. For the last eight months of our stay under Japanese
control, the issue was just under half a pound.
Now these facts are not meant to stir you into a frenzy
of excitement. They did not so stir us, either. They were the
plain, unvarnished, brutal facts of life in prison camp.
What is a prisoner of War? More properly, I suppose, I
should say, 'Who is a prisoner of War?" By technical definition,
a prisoner of war is a personality, an entity, an individual. In
actuality, a prisoner of war is just a number, a body, a thing
to be shoved around, marched or herded or disposed of as the
victor decides.
The Japanese, for instance, for the first 8 months of our
imprisonment, told us we were captives. No names were taken, no
identity was solicited except for the higher officers. We were
merely numbers. When one died that was one less on the roll, not
a name to be reported.
This is not an unusual situation in war. As a matter of
fact, prisoners in 20th Century wars have had it far easier than
their more ancient cousins. Only in 1907 at the Hague Convention
was anything like a uniform rule of treatment of prisoners of
war drawn up and agreed to by many of the major powers. Japan
did not sign that agreement but later said she would abide by
its conditions.
Those conditions included such provisions as: A prisoner
of war shall give his name, rank and military service number. He
shall receive pay of similar rank in the capturing army. He
shall receive rations and accommodations received by similar
rank in the capturing army. He may be put to work but not on
military installations and only as befitting his rank. He shall
not be subject to cruel or inhuman treatment. He may be shot
while attempting to escape but he may not be shot for an
attempted escape. A limitation on his liberty may be imposed for
attempted escape. That is, he may be placed in closer
confinement for an escape attempt.
These rules, as I have said, were drawn up by a group of
frock coated men, sitting around a cloth covered table in a

warm, dry room under more-or-less favorable conditions. To a
front line soldier, with orders to take an objective or be
killed in the attempt, an enemy is an enemy and he is best dead.
The very act of capturing him may mean the difference between
life and death for him and his comrades. Even though he may
capture his enemy, he is in jeopardy. That enemy becomes a
severe responsibility.
In recent years, the United States Military machine has
instituted a certain code of conduct for prisoners of war. They
are limited, by this code, to giving only that information
allowed by the Geneva Convention.
This, of course, is a mockery of brave men. Any man can
be made to tell anything he knows and not show a mark on his
body as a result of the torture he has suffered.
Standing men at attention in the Sun, withholding water
and keeping a man in an uncomfortable position for long periods
of time were methods used by the Japanese. It is really not
difficult to make a man talk and when questions are asked for 10
or 14 hours at a time and the questions tabulated, the
information eventually comes out. At least, discrepancies and
fabrications can be easily spotted.
There are other methods quite as effective if a bit
crude. Plain terror or brutality is very effective in reducing
men to compliance. One prisoner who was marched out of Bataan in
a group before mine told of being kept overnight at Lubao. He
said that several hundred men were kept for two nights in a
chickenwire enclosure.
On the first morning, a Japanese guard came to the gate
of the enclosure and stood looking carefully over the field of
Americans and Filipinos squatting closely together throughout
the enclosure. The guard had a pick handle in his hand. The
guard finally seemed to spot someone and began clawing his way
over prisoners toward the Filipino who sensed the objective and
ran screaming. It was no use. The Japanese guard came
relentlessly on and finally, catching up with his prey, clubbed
him to death.
The next morning, the same act was repeated. Brutality of
this sort has a way of softening men's minds. They become more
pliable. Just the knowledge that a Japanese soldier could, at
any time, beat you to death for any cause, or no cause, had a
very sobering effect.
Many men in many wars before us had experienced
privations. Here, I would like to have you look at all these
privations, hardships, this monotonous way of life. We had
something in prison camp though, that is sadly lacking in our
American society. The very elements that confined us; the very
lack of food that starved us; the dire necessity that made us

victims of power; these also contributed to our salvation. Here
we were, a little group of men scattered over a large area in a
strange, tropical land. We naturally formed into little groups.
Those men most congenial to each other tended to gather
together. In most cases, men were thrown together by chance or
circumstance. In some of these groups where incompatibilities
flourished, severe stresses emerged. On the whole, men tried
valiantly to have a grin and a cheery greeting for their
fellows. Even when the going was tough, when the bombs were
falling or the shells bursting close by, there was a nonchalance
in outward appearances. We sat in Bilibid Prison in Manila for
eight months while the American Navy took that city apart brick
by brick. Raiding aircraft came in several times each day, as
many as 200 at a time. Our only protection was a thin sheet
metal roof.
These stresses I speak of only added to our kinship. We
had some-thing here that modern civilization lacks: we had a
common enemy. We were tied together by invisible threads, each
dependent upon the other. We were members of a group. Each man
was an integral member, too. He knew he belonged. That one force
alone is a powerful factor in any man's emotional life. I would
like to examine this factor more closely for a minute. We can
say that primitive societies were in this sane category. Their
hard-ships and privations held them together. It is stresses
such as these that make for close harmony. A common objective.
When the objective becomes diffused then the partnership
weakens. I saw many men whose emotional stability allowed them
to accomplish amazing feats in prison camp. Those same men
literally came apart at the seams under the diverse and complex
demands of peacetime existence. As a matter of fact, some of
those same men needed psychiatric treatment within a year after
they were repatriated.
The very fact that our objectives were basic and limited
in number and general throughout the camp was a great source of
strength. We wanted enough food to keep alive. We wanted to stay
alive until "them Yanks" got there to pull us out of the
wreckage. All other objectives were passed over as subordinate.
A man might want a pair of shoes. He might want a smoke. He had
only to weigh the desire against the main objective. If it
helped him to live, to be alive until the Americans arrived,
then it was good.
But there were other considerations, too. We were a
society. We had our taboos, our forbidden fruit. The principal
taboo was to do anything to aid or comfort the enemy. We had no
taboos regarding women because there were no women. When men are
starving, they do not think of their women except as symbols.
They were the prize that awaited their safe return. We had no

taboos regarding liquor for there was no liquor. Each day a man
lived through this ordeal he more firmly resolved that this day
should not have been lived in vain.
One other lesson I learned during those three years was
an approximation of the parable, "The Meek shall inherit the
Earth." We had, in prison camp, some men who might be regarded
as strong. These men were lone wolves in their dealings. They
were the ones who had gotten a start by some lucky break. They
had some money or they had goods that could be traded. They were
the "big operators." The number of such persons was small but
they can be found in every society. In the end, it was not these
men who survived. One mistake and they were through. It was the
so-called weak men who banded together for protection who
survived. They could afford to make many mistakes. That their
compatriots would share them brought them through. The very
weakness of these men was their strength. They formed a cushion
against the vicissitudes of their environment.
These parables are not hazy abstractions lurking
somewhere in my consciousness. They are burned into my very
being. They have a vibrant potency that colors every act.
There are natural laws by which we live. Just as surely
as we break those laws, we're going to suffer. One of those laws
is that the fit shall survive. The survival of the fittest is
one law of which we have all heard. We have all seen it operate.
One of the boys said to me one day in prison camp, "Bill, why is
it that all these men are dying? They are big healthy men. I
have always been a sawed-off little runt. I could never take the
hardships these other men could stand." That boy survived
because he was spiritually more fit than those others. He had a
quality of bulldog tenacity that the others could not muster. He
had suffered before and he knew how to marshal the forces that
sustained him. I do not say that all men who died were incapable
or had any less stamina. Somewhere, somehow it was the man who
could adjust to the situation that came through best.

The Attack on Clark Air Base
CHAPTER 1
THE WAR BEGINS
Almost everyone has his own story of how he first heard
of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Mine is quite
simple. My friend, Swede Carlson, reached his hand under my
mosquito netting and shook me awake with the news. Instead of
being Sunday, December 7, though, it was Monday morning,
December 8, and about 3 A.M., too. The 7,000 miles between
Hawaii and the Philippines makes the difference in sun time. The
attack on Pearl was under way and a flash had just come in from
General Macarthur’s headquarters in Manila.
"The war is on," said Swede. "They are bombing Pearl."
I knew the "they" Swede referred to was the Imperial
Japanese Navy and Air Arm of the fleet. We had received word
some 10 days before that our submarines had lost contact with
units of the Japanese carrier force. Our search area, and we
were out for many a weary hour with our B17s, was in the South
China Sea and along the coast of the Malay Peninsula. Now I knew
why we had not found those carriers. They had gone by a
northerly route and struck Hawaii.
Clark Air Base, located some 60 miles north of Manila and
adjacent to Fort Stotsenberg in Pampanga Province of the
Philippines, had been on a war footing for two weeks. We carried
sidearms, wore our tin hats and were supposedly ready for an
attack. The machine gun pits were ready with guns and
ammunition. Crews were ready to take over at a minute's notice.
Several companies of anti-aircraft batteries ringed the field. A
defense perimeter of tanks had been set up, too. Against a
surprise attack, we had already located half of our B17s at Del
Monte on the island of Mindanao, some 500 miles south of Clark.
Only a lack of adequate water supply had kept us from moving
there ourselves.
After I had gotten up and dressed, I reported to the
Squadron Commander, Major Davis. He said he would call me if
there was any further word. We lay down and waited for daylight.
The sobering thought that we were sitting right in the
backyard of a very clever enemy did not lighten our spirits. One
old Infantry soldier whom I had been using as a supply sergeant
came up to me early the next morning and suggested that we
should just load up our B17s and "bomb Hell out of Tokyo." When
I pointed out that we were not going to "bomb Hell out of Tokyo"
that day or for a number of days to come, he called me a
Communist. The fact that Tokyo was some 2,000 miles away and a
-1-

B17 with a bomb load could only fly to a target about 1,000
miles distant did little to orient his thinking.
Our Base Commander, Colonel Eubanks, had his staff
prepare a plan for the bombing of Formosa, some 500 miles north
of Luzon, where Clark is located. The 20 or so B17s we had
available were loaded with 14 300-pound bombs each and made
ready for the mission. The details of the plan were sent to
Manila by special courier. General MacArthur put the nix on the
operation. We never did know the reason except that he might
have felt it too risky. Formosa was one of the biggest Japanese
bases and its fighter protection would be heavy. The distance
was too great for a fighter escort from Clark for the American
bombers. So, the B17s sat on the ground till 10 A.M. of that
fateful Monday morning. All this time, our Air-Warn system was
being monitored closely. As far as I know, this system consisted
of one radar station at Iba, a gunnery range northwest of Clark
Air Base. In addition to this mobile unit, coast watchers were
stationed at a number of points. On that morning of December 8,
these watchers reported many sightings of unidentified aircraft.
None approached too closely, however. About 10 A.M. there was a
general alert. Every available plane on the base took off. There
was no firm word of an attack and the planes were ordered to
search for enemy ships. None was sighted and about noon all the
planes were ordered back. They landed, were refueled, the crews
sent to lunch and fresh crews stood by.
My repair crews worked in three shifts. One crew came to
work at 7 A.M. and worked till noon when another replaced them.
The night crew was on duty from 5 P.M. till they finished. So, I
walked back to the barracks about noon and had a quick lunch. It
was about 12:30 when I came out of the mess hall and started
back to the shop area. The day was clear, warm and quiet. I
could see the wide spreading acacia trees forming the backdrop
to the hangar line. The quiet, noonday haze lay over the land.
The leaves of the trees barely fluttered in the movement of the
lazy breeze. It was a typical tropical day.
I headed out across the grassy meadow that lay between me
and the hangar line. It was, I thought, a very nice day to lie
beside a quiet stream, not a day to begin a war.
The drone of high flying aircraft reached my ears. I
looked up, almost unconsciously. There they were, 54 bombers in
perfect formation, the sun glistening on their wings. I guessed
the altitude at about 12,000 feet. I knew from the unfamiliar
wing outlines, the tight battle formation and the heading that
these were Japanese bombers. I knew, too, that they were only
minutes away from the bomb release point. My slow gait became a
dead run as I flung myself across the grass and to the area
where my men worked.
-2-

"Get out, get out of here," I shouted. "Get into those
foxholes."
The heavy, dull explosions were coming faster and closer.
The bombs were walking right down the line of hangars. Ours was
the last one. Standing on the edge of the big hole where most of
my men had jumped, I saw the first bomber almost directly
overhead. Then, I heard a slight rasping sound, a sort of
swizzle as something passed through the air at high speed as I
leaped into the hole. Without even thinking, I knew it was a
bomb, the first I had ever heard from the ground. The explosion
that occurred a few seconds later was almost an anti-climax.
That swizzle had scared me more than anything else ever had.
They had missed our hangar with their bombs but they had gotten
a direct hit on almost every other building on the line. The
bombers trailed off in the puffs of smoke of the anti-aircraft
fire.
As the bombers wheeled off to the south, I climbed out of
the sandy hole and scrambled to the road in back of the shop.
The crackling flames and continuing explosions filled the air
with a crescendo of vibration. My eyes followed the road to a
machine gun pit, much like the one we had been using. All at
once I saw it erupt in a mushrooming billow of sand, flame and
men's bodies. Then, I saw the plane. It was slow, diving-- a
fighter with long wings. The small bombs it carried in wing
racks had made a direct hit on the gun. It was already pulling
out of its dive, spitting fire from its forward machine guns. I
dived back into the hole.
A radio man came charging out of the Communication shack
close by. Before he had gone half a dozen steps something hit
him and sent him sprawling. It was another fighter. This one
dove close in on the shack and riddled it with bullets. The
radio man lay still. He had been killed instantly.
Now came the snarling, firespitting fighters in number.
Diving in and out of the sun, they blasted at the machine gun
emplacements with a 2 h cannon. Streaking through the smoke from
the burning hangars, their machine guns spitting a steady
stream, they methodically sought out the gasoline tank trucks
and set them ablaze.
Along with the crackle of flames came the explosions as
ammunition bins were ignited. The remaining planes on the ground
were a prime target. With pass after pass, the Japanese pilots
swooped down on the big B17s scattered across the parking ramps
and tore at their wings with incendiary fire. Each one of those
big bombers had over 2,500 gallons of gasoline aboard. They were
not neutral targets for the most part, though. Each one had at
least eight defense guns mounted in turrets in the nose, sides
and top of the fuselage. Sergeant Tony Holub, crew chief of one
-3-

B17 staved off attackers time and time again. When his guns ran
out of ammunition, he ran to another burning B17 and stripped
its ammo boxes out to continue his defense. He was credited with
shooting down one Japanese plane in the scramble.
All the hangars on the flying line were ablaze except our
machine shop. It had not received a direct hit from the bombing.
There were hundreds of machine gun holes in the light metal
roof, but it was essentially intact. The paint show next door
was burning fiercely, though, and this fire was spreading to the
machine tools inside our building.
Alfred Crabtree and I ran into the building and
unlimbered the fire hose. The pressure was too low to do any
good. We pulled down the small fire extinguishers and tried to
control the blaze. It seemed little use. Finally, in an act of
desperation, I threw one big, empty fire extinguisher at the
wall. The metal sheathing gave way and we were able to get a
cable over the 50-gallon drum of paint that was burning and pull
it away from the building. As the fighters zoomed in for their
strafing runs, Alf and I would take a breather under a lathe or
behind some piece of equipment.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack was over.
It had lasted about 45 minutes. What had been a well-regulated
and somewhat efficient airbase was a shambles.
Now there was a new noise: the sound of fire sirens,
ambulances, the shouts of men, the cries of the wounded. The
transportation unit next to the machine shop was a roaring
inferno as the trucks burned, their gasoline tanks exploding.
The paint lockers on the other side of our building were pretty
well isolated by this time so that did not present a danger.
One man in a slit trench at the side of the building had
been buried alive as a close bomb hit had tumbled the loose sand
in on top of him. Another was killed near the front door to the
shop. Aside from these two, my crew had come off well. We set
about isolating the blaze in the garage. As water pressure built
up, we went from building to building with the fire control
crews and extinguished the fires. By late afternoon, we were
exhausted. We knew we were more vulnerable than ever, though,
and would have to set up a defense against future attacks.
My first concern was the tools that would assist in
repair of the damaged aircraft. I knew my men would be required
to work hard and long. They would have to have better protection
than we had originally provided. I set one crew to work
constructing a satisfactory shelter of wood and steel close by.
I assigned another man with one duty, Air Raid Warden. When he
saw the bombers making an approach, he was to hammer on his
gong. No one was to head for a shelter till John sounded the
alarm. The boys knew that John would be dependable. We worked as
-4-

far into the night as our "blackout" lights would permit, took a
few hours off to eat and sleep and began again.
The night of that disastrous day, December 8, 1941,
officers and many of the noncoms assembled at Headquarters for a
damage report. It was there that I learned about the death of
Major Davis, our Squadron Commander, the loss of Captain
Fairfield and several other officers. I never did learn the
exact number of men killed in that first raid but it must have
been about 300.
As I had lain in that open pit, my face buried in the
sand, I had suddenly realized that this was war, my very first
war. It was a shooting war and those bombs were very real. It
was also something of a shock to realize that those guys were
shooting at me and those bombs were meant to do bodily harm.
In my 14 or more years as a soldier, I had heard about
wars, of the men who took part in them and of their courage and
gallantry. I knew that, as a soldier, I should not be as
frightened as I was. I also knew that I should be courageous and
that I should have some gallant thing to be doing. I did not
feel at all courageous, though, and there seemed absolutely
nothing gallant to do. I just lay with my face in the dirt and
waited till the bombers had passed. I was sure there would come
a day when I could demonstrate whether I had any courage and I
would even try to be just a little bit gallant. I suddenly
realized, too, that I did not think I was going to like this
shooting war at all. The destruction, the spilling of blood, the
wanton brutality of it all went against all my training and
teaching. In those few minutes I lay in that first hole during
that first bombing raid, I came to the solid conclusion that
war, any war, was an evil thing. I did not like people shooting
at me or my friends.
I had never given this problem of war more than passing
notice before but from that moment on I would give it my
undivided attention for many, long months. In the end, too,
after years of participation and study, I still have found no
valid reason for fighting a war.
The loss of Major Davis and Captain Fairfield was a
serious blow. Davis, a tall, gaunt, pipesmoking Texan, had been
assigned to the squadron as its commander at Albuquerque in mid-
1941. He had the appearance and demeanor of a poorly trained
Reserve officer. He was neither slovenly nor languid nor stupid
in running the squadron, though. He worked patiently, quietly
and honestly with the men and, by the time we sailed overseas,
he had built an efficient organization.
A service organization, such as the 7th Material Squadron
with its manifold duties, is always hard to weld into a cohesive
unit. The men are scattered all over the airbase. They work at
-5-

everything from the telephone exchange to engineering to fire
department to security section to flight line. Davis had
tightened up a little here, loosened up a bit there, shown a
personal interest in each man of the 325 enlisted cadre and
shown that he was not only the boss but the protector and leader
of the group. His loss would be felt immediately. He had been
killed while leaving the Officers Club after lunch by one of the
first bombs the Japanese dropped. Badly hurt in the same bombing
was Captain Fairfield, my Engineering Officer, and immediate
superior. While "Uncle Willie" Fairfield was not killed, he was
so badly mangled he spent many months in a hospital and was
shipped out of the Philippines on a hospital ship. Lieutenant
Jack Kelly, squadron adjutant, was assigned to command of the
squadron with Lieutenant Jack Kaster as his junior adjutant.
With at least four of our officers gone and only a few
green ones remaining, we were woefully short of leadership. The
noncommissioned officers were pretty well given their heads. We
were all old hands, though. There were a few noncoms who went
down the drain but, by and large, it was the enlisted personnel
who held things together during those three hard weeks at Clark
before the move to Bataan. Our First Sergeant was one who had to
be replaced. He and a couple of other high ranking noncoms just
folded up after those first hard air attacks. In order to keep
their almost pathological fear from infecting the other boys,
they were moved into a small bivouac outside the base. This
unreasoning fear of bombers was not an easy emotion to overcome.
I found that men who worked with me on the hangar line for a
week and were given a few hours off found it very difficult to
return. In the end, I never let a man go for more than a couple
of hours. The sweet breath of calm, safety and relaxation was
too much to trade for the tension, fear and hazard of being in a
spot that was constantly under attack. As a consequence of this
isolation of my crew on the hangar line, we saw and heard little
except what happened down there. No one ever came by for a visit
or to relay the news or rumors.
We worked hard, long hours and we rebuilt airplanes and
rolling stock from morning till night, and for half the night as
well. Those late night talks in the still, balmy air leaning
with our backs to the shop wall were wonderfully relaxing. My
love of the tropics comes from the memory of the still, calm,
warm nights, the fragrance of exotic blossoms floating in on the
humid air. Of course, there were a few mosquitoes but most other
insects as well as the lizards were quiet. One could see the
huge flights of fruit bats winging their way across the dark sky
and hear the cry of distant birds, but the heavy air just
settled over you with its protecting canopy.
-6-

It was at night, too, that we bathed, washed our clothes
and wrote notes we doubted would ever get delivered. We found
that bathing in the daytime was a hazardous business. Getting
away to an outlying stream was impossible and the shower house
was too close to the center of camp. I well remember when the
air raid alert rang one afternoon and one of my boys who had
been taking a shower came charging out of the shower room clad
only in his gun belt and pistol. It was in that raid, too, that
the Japanese got a hit on a supply building housing a quantity
of signal flares, tear gas grenades and parachute flares. We
thought for a time that gas warfare had begun all over again.
The Japanese bomber force was sent frequently and
repeatedly to wipe us out. They bombed from on top of the cloud
deck and missed us by wide margins. They came in under the cloud
deck and seemed to have trouble lining us up in their sights for
they missed from 1,000 feet as well. We had bombs land within
ten feet of the front door that did not explode. We had c r ate
r s on every side of the building. We had our power supply
knocked out, our telephone lines cut and our access roads
destroyed but not one single bomb hit our building.
It was not easy to work under such conditions, but my
boys stayed with it. John Bennet and his big gong were
trustworthy. Our shelters were well constructed. We had two main
shelters. One was a heavily reinforced concrete grease rack
whose ramps protected the sides. We had piled railroad ties
across the top and welded heavy pipe on top with chains as a
burster strip. Because it was open at both ends, we were
somewhat ex-posed but the openings protected us from concussion
of near misses. The air of those blasts would "whoosh" in and
out harmlessly. In shelters with only one opening, a near miss
could kill everyone inside just with concussion.
Our other main shelter was dug under the cement floor of
the burned out paint shop next door. We piled sand on top of the
large slab and stacked burned, corrugated metal on top of that
as a burster strip. In one raid, Larry Hamilton and I had dived
into a trench close by the en-trance to the shop and sat smoking
while the bombers approached.
When they were directly overhead, Larry said, “They are
going to pass us by this time."
Just then we heard that terrifying whistle of a big bomb
sliding through the air. We buried ourselves as well as we
could. There was that deafening roar as the bomb struck and
exploded. The dirt of the trench walls showered down on us. The
rocks and debris flew in all directions. Other bombs exploded
nearby and the bombers were gone. As we looked gingerly out at
our shelters, we were amazed to find that the one we had so
carefully piled high with sand and corrugated metal was swept
-7-

clean as though with a broom. It was a clean cement slab once
again. It had taken a direct hit and come through in good shape.
The one boy, Harrington, who had sought shelter in there crawled
out, nervous and shaking but undamaged. The burster strip of
metal had detonated the bomb and the sand had cushioned the
shock of the explosion.
The next day we got something of a break. Aside from
"Photo Joe of the Tokyo Camera Club" and a couple of stray
fighters, bad weather kept the Japs away. There was a storm in
the South China Sea and they could not get through.
Most of the planes that were flyable were sent out to
emergency strips where they could be hidden in the brush. Not
only is it very difficult to hide a B17 with its 105-foot
wingspread, but only a very few strips could take its 10-ton
bulk. In a land where 100 inches of rain is not uncommon in a
year, only a well-prepared runway will withstand loads like
that.
We knew the bombers would be back and we worked
feverishly to be ready for them. The B17s would take off early,
with the sky just barely light enough to see the runway, streak
off to look for Japanese shipping and land at Del Monte Air
Field some 500 miles south. They would return as darkness closed
in for more bombs and gasoline to repeat the process the next
morning.
During the day, my men would scavenge partially destroyed
trucks, cannibalize them and rebuild others. We towed in stray
cars, wired around the ignition system, installed toggle
switches, replaced the exploded tires and turned them over to
Headquarters. Most of the gasoline tankers that had not burned
had flat tires from the concussion of the bursting bombs. We
replaced these with new tires and got the tanker fleet back in
operation. We pulled in as much field equipment as we could
salvage, boxed it for future use and sent it to a dump out in
the jungle. I sent a crew of men with the equipment to organize
it against the day when we should be forced to operate in the
field.
We were fortunate in having about 1,000 feet of ceiling
for a week or so. This low overcast kept the bombers upstairs
till they got a fix. They would circle overhead for upwards of
an hour before making their dive and run-through to drop the
bombs. Not only were they better targets on such occasions, but
the bombs did not have time to flatten out. They would skip
along the ground and many did not explode. After such a raid,
there might be a couple of dozen 100-pound bombs lying scattered
over the fields adjacent to the hangar. Some would be split
open, the picric acid contents spilling yellow powder over the
surrounding area. Picric acid is a good explosive or so I was
-8-

told, but it is very unstable. We respected these duds and
called the engineers to blow up the bombs each evening.
One busy morning, too, a 2,000 gallon gasoline tanker was
caught in a raid just as he was passing our shop. The driver
jumped from the cab at the sound of John Bennet's gong and ran
for our shelter. A bomb did explode close by, a piece of
shrapnel piercing the tanker's side.
I had jumped into a hole close to the tanker and could
see the stream of gasoline pouring from the truck. As soon as
the bombers had passed, I called to Larry Hamilton to get a
hammer; all the time running toward the truck with a small stick
of wood I picked up. The wooden plug just about fitted the
jagged hole made by the bomb splinter. When Hamilton came with
the hammer, we pounded the plug in tight, knowing that the
gasoline would swell its bulk to seal any leak. Several months
later, that plug was still holding and the tanker was still in
use on Bataan.
After the first day or so of quiet, the enemy air
activity increased. Our Air Warden would spot the planes as they
neared the base. He would strike the gong. Then, as they came in
on their bombing run, we would hear the clank of the alarm and
run for shelter. By this time, we had several adjacent to the
area. I did not want all the boys in any one hole. The story of
"Hogan's Corner" is not a dramatic one. It was the way we fought
our war in order to be able to hit back when we got the chance.
On one of these days, following a hard 12 hours of
sweating out the bombs and repairing cars, I stood in the cool
evening air and looked out toward Mt. Arayat, just north of the
field. A B17 was making its approach after an all-day patrol.
Even as I watched, I could see a small plane come in on the tail
of the bomber and make an attack. Though there was no noise
above the drone of the bomber's engines, I could tell the B17
was in trouble. Within minutes, the left wing folded up and the
bomber began to fall. It was almost as though a toy had been
broken in midair, the pieces falling like a crazily spiralling
leaf. I thought I could see a parachute open but this is not
distinct in my mind. From the five miles or so away, the wing
and the rest of the plane continued to fall, the sun glinting on
the metal as it tumbled, crazily, to the ground.
That evening, we got the news that this had been Captain
Colin Kelly's last flight. He had flown some very effective
missions. That Jap had followed him in and gotten into his blind
spot directly back of the tail to chop off the wing with machine
gun fire.
Later on, the Japs were to be rudely awakened as newer
models of the B17s with tail guns chopped them down as they came
in for a tail shot. One of our bombers with a tail gun was
-9-

-10-
attacked over Masbate a few weeks later and shot down five
planes before being disabled herself. It was the tail gun that
got them all.
The loss of Colin Kelly was hard for all of us. We seemed
to be losing in every area. The fact that Kelly had gotten hits
on several units of the Japanese fleet had been our only
encouragement. Now, he was gone. The loss of other men filtered
in. Major Gibbs, Base Adjutant, was also missing in a B18. He
had taken off shortly after the first bombing raid for Mindanao.
He never arrived. It was later learned that his plane was hit
and the crew bailed out. They were picked up by Filipinos and
secreted on an island where they lived out the war. With some
7,500 such islands in the Philippine Archipelago, the Japs could
not search completely.
Of our 100 or so fighters, many had been lost on the
ground the first day. Others were flown to outlying fields where
they operated in scouting missions. To the best of my knowledge,
we had no fighter protection over Clark during the three weeks
we operated there after the first raid.
The fact was self-evident that the fighters we did have
were second-rate. The P40s had superb fire power with their six
50-caliber machine guns in the leading edge of the wings. They
did not climb fast enough to match the Japanese Zeros, though.
The Zero, too, could turn inside the P40. Still, our pilots,
being better trained, had quite an advantage. On more than one
occasion, through sheer skill, they shot down Japanese fighters.
The Japanese planes were built for speed and
maneuverability, not ruggedness. Their pilots did not even wear
parachutes. The 20m cannon some of them carried was a good gun,
but it lost much of its effectiveness in a dog fight. It was a
slow firing gun. The P40s, on the other hand, could throw out a
veritable fusillade of lead and steel, and at a rate of some 600
rounds a minute.
In addition to the P40s, we had some outmoded P35s, a
model that had not been accepted by the Air Corps. When they did
not work out, they were sent to the Philippines. The P26
fighters that had formed the first line of our fighter force in
the early 30's were also given to the Philippine Air Force. They
had a top speed of 200 miles an hour and were woefully
inadequate for use in a 1940 war. Our fighter strength was
limited almost wholly to reconnaissance and search.
Our mission at Clark, then, was in the recovery,
organization and repair of as much equipment as possible against
the day when we c r should have to move into the field. The
rolling stock came first in order that we might be able to move.
Next, we assembled all the tools we could salvage and readied
them for future use. We had several self-contained field shops

-11-
with their own power supplies, lathes, and metal-cutting tools.
By the last week of December, we were ready. It was none too
soon.
The Japanese made their landings in strength at Lingayen
Gulf about the middle of December though they had landed farther
north on December 10. This Lingayen landing was the main push.
Filipino troops fought only a delaying action as they withdrew
before the superior forces.
The Move to Bataan
On December 24, we got our move orders. We were ready.
Our trucks and field shops were stocked with everything we might
need to operate. As we pulled out of the shop that had led such
a charmed life, we dismantled the remaining tools and left them
useless. The engineers would complete the job with explosives.
It was my job to get our equipment to Lubao, a small town on the
road to Bataan.
As darkness settled down on Christmas Eve, 1941, we
rolled this convoy down the tree-lined road. It was a dark,
moonless night. We drove without lights, feeling our way along
through the warm, still air, through a canyon between the trees.
Our route to San Fernando was well-known to us. By the time we
had progressed that far we had become accustomed to the road.
Then, we turned off and headed for Lubao, another 30 km or so.
As we neared the small town, military police helped guide us
through the blackness of the night to a bivouac area where we
could park the trucks. I had to detach some of the semis and
return to Clark for more trailers. It was midnight before I
could get back on the road again. By 4 A.M., my small convoy was
hooked up and on the road back to Lubao once again. We had
better going this time for daylight showed us the way. This
second trip from Clark Field to Lubao took on the appearance of
an impressive convoy. As daylight gave us more visibility, we
were able to speed our pace. Not only did we have several large
vans filled with tools and equipment, but half a dozen gasoline
tankers brought up the rear.
As we rounded one slight bend in the road just out of
Lubao, a pickup truck streaked down the narrow highway from the
opposite direction. Those of us in the lead were able to dodge
his recklessness. One of the gasoline tankers, though, caught
unawares, had to jam on his brakes. The big tanker jackknifed
and slid into the deep ditch. Neither the driver nor the helper
was hurt but we had no equipment to get that 4,000-gallon tank
truck back on the road again. We left it with a guard and
proceeded on to Lubao. The engineers were able to drain off the

-12-
gas to another truck later on and salvage the vehicle. Gasoline,
which could not be replaced, was a valuable item in our war.
Christmas Eve came and went without any great incident.
There was one stirring sight, though. In the blackout of that
night, the town of Lubao was only a huddle of stone and brick
buildings. Not a light was evident. Not a light, that is, except
one tree in the village square. I had never seen its like
before. It was a smallish, bushy, round tree. Clinging to its
many branches, leaves and trunk were thousands of tiny fireflies
that glittered, sparkled and buzzed with a luminous beauty I -
have not witnessed since. This, the firefly tree at Lubao, was
the loveliest Christmas tree I ever hope to see. I had never
witnessed such a sight before and, as a matter of fact, never
seen a firefly. I tried to pick up one of the little insects and
was stung painfully. I never did find out whether it was
electric shock or heat. I only know those fireflies were real
and they were beautiful.
I got some sleep on Christmas Day. That night my job was
to unload a boxcar due to arrive from Clark in the late evening
and transport its contents to Bataan. Sgts. Schrieber, Huber and
a couple of other boys were to assist. As the rest of our
contingent pulled out in the evening for Bataan, we settled down
to wait. A small local cafe served us a delicious meal of
pansit. There was a large supply of rice fried with small bits
of pork and chicken, vegetables and nuts. It was a wonderful
meal and the last good one for many a long and weary day.
Our train arrived about midnight and we unloaded it
aboard our big van. Some of the officers had included even their
easy chairs which I had the men toss out for lack of room. I got
chewed out for this later on but the reprimand did not even
scratch the surface. We were interested in oxygen and acetylene
for welding, metal for aircraft, tools for building metal parts
and electrical equipment. It was almost daylight before we got
on the road again.
After we had succeeded in unloading the boxcar, we
stopped only long enough to grab a bite to eat. We knew that
this railhead would be a prime target for bombers. A carload of
"C" rations was being unloaded from another car in the train and
the guard gave us a case. We each opened several tins. I had
never seen "C" rations before. The cans were in pairs, one
containing hash, another biscuits and cigarettes. There may have
been other combinations, too. At any rate, the hash and biscuit
tasted very good. I put the remainder of the 48 cans on a shelf
in the truck against the day when we should need them. Though I
did not know it that was the only time in my life I was to taste
"C" rations. When I went back to retrieve my food supply,
someone had stolen it.

-13-
With our heavily loaded truck, we headed out of Lubao
into the open rice country for Bataan. In broad daylight with
the drone of bombers in the offing, it seemed like a foolhardy
expedition. I knew, though, that this road would be a continuous
convoy of heavy equipment all day and for several days as the
various units headed toward the final battle ground. There was
no other road. This one was narrow, none too well paved and it
fell off into deep drainage ditches on either side. My orders,
too, had been to get that truck to Bataan as soon as possible.
On either side of the road, the land fell away into flat
rice paddies for a mile. This was the harvest season. The rice
straw was piled into high stacks after the threshing. On one
stubbled field, this straw had been piled high on huge wagons
which were scattered over the expanse of a particularly flat
piece. It was an improvised landing strip for fighters. As the
ships landed or took off, the wagons were moved to the edges to
make room for the aircraft, then moved back to simulate an
innocent rice field.
We drove as fast as the heavy traffic would permit;
Filipino MPs hurrying us along. Our engine had developed a
cracked block and we had to stop every half hour for water from
the ditches along the side of the road. There were times when
the MPs waved frantically for us to stop and take cover from
enemy bombers. I ordered the driver to keep going. We would be
no more of a target as moving vehicles than we would be standing
still in that open country. The bombers were evidently on other
missions for, though they flew over in tight formations, time
after time, they did not make a bomb run on that road. Had the
Japanese cut that road to Bataan, there would have been no long
siege. MacArthur's words, "The next 72 hours will determine the
fate of the Philippines," was a truthful one. Only towards the
very end of the withdrawal into Bataan did the Japanese realize
what was happening. Some 50,000 men and thousands of tons of
military equipment made that trek into Bataan in those 72 hours.
As my convoy achieved the shelter of the jungle and trees
of Bataan, we did get a close bombing. It was only close,
though. We had to abandon our tractor at that point and send for
another. The equipment was well hidden from Japanese eyes and we
were able to set up a complete shop by nightfall.
By the time we arrived, the 300-odd other men of the
squadron had been assigned a campsite and the officers had
organized the bivouac. My crew, which had been on the move most
of the last 48 hours, lay down and slept.
The Japanese now began to realize what was happening and
high flying bombers and dive bombers were overhead constantly
during the morning hours. We awoke to the sound of anti-aircraft
fire, the explosion of bombs and the shriek of sirens. A small,

-14-
flat valley next to our bivouac was being cleared as a fighter
strip. A few civilian engineers with tractors were leveling the
land. An anti-aircraft gun emplacement was being in- stalled for
protection. It was a long, clean and efficient 3-inch gun
nestled back in a covering of trees at the edge of the runway.
An electric cable ran out across the end of the strip to a small
pile of rice straw where the spotters lay hidden with their
rangefinders. This gun fired well as the enemy bombers came over
to harass the workmen leveling the field. On the second day of
its operations disaster struck. One of the shells, either
defective or set to explode at low altitude, went off as it
emerged from the muzzle. A muzzle burst is the most dreaded and
dangerous part of the life of an anti-aircraft gunner. The
shells killed Captain White instantly and injured several other
men. With credit to the crew, the gun was out of action for only
a couple of hours. We had no really close hits, though; the high
cover of the tall trees protected our concealment. We spent the
next few days in the organization of our equipment to service
those fighters destined to use the strip.
We were always up before daylight in order to get a jump
on breakfast before the bombers came. Then, we worked in the
machine shop trailer building equipment for the kitchen,
building up a supply of the parts we knew would be needed, and
organizing the tools into separate caches. There was always the
chance that a bomb hit would destroy a part of our shop. We
wanted to have other supplies in that event.
One evening one of my boys told me of a swimming hole he
had found not far from camp. Taking a towel and my dirty clothes
I went with him back into the jungle for a quarter of a mile.
There, formed by a depression in the rocks, was a lovely pool
some 50 feet long and half as wide. Fresh water came into it
from the stream and drained off at the other end. Creepers,
willows, and ferns surrounded the edges. It was a tropical
paradise in a land that had come to mean only sweat, filth, and
fatigue to me.
The pool was far enough back from camp to be relatively
free from bombers, shaded from the setting sun, cool and clean.
A dozen or so of us got up there for a bath as often as the war
would release us from duty. Somewhat back of the pool a Filipino
family had cleared two or three acres of rice field. This, too,
was a quiet haven. After a day of tension and work, we would
steal off for an hour of solitude in the quiet of the tropical
evening. That quarter of a mile walk was just far enough to
remove us from the war zone that it seemed far more remote than
it actually was.

CHAPTER II
A BACKWARD LOOK
-15-
This digression brings us up to the end of that most
eventful year, 1941, a year full of action, moves, excitement
and some degree of danger. I was in my 35th year, had served 14
years in the Army Air Corps and had achieved its highest
noncommissioned rank, Master Sergeant. I had never thought of
myself as an ambitious boy, but I had hardly reached the first
rung of the ladder to my view of a successful career in the
Army. First, I knew I must somehow get a commission. It was not
wholly a matter of be- coming an Army Officer that intrigued me.
It was the knowledge that only by becoming an officer could I do
the things I felt were necessary.
I knew the importance of noncommissioned officers. I was
conscious of their role in carrying out the orders efficiently.
I had seen good noncoms and poor noncoms at work and was aware
of what they could and could not do. Overriding all this, I knew
that it was the officers who gave the orders, set the stage and
called the signals. If we did not have good, well-trained
officers to lead our men, we would not have a good air arm.
The great weakness of having flight officers spend
portions of their time supervising squadron messes, managing
post exchanges, running the Base nursery as well as supervising
the hundreds of other administrative tasks was a waste of highly
specialized manpower. There was no doubt but that these highly
trained flyers could handle such jobs; it was just that their
skills could and should be used in the area for which they had
been trained.
It was necessary, too, that greater leadership of the
personnel off the hangar line should be given. There was, I
knew, at least 100 hours of time spent on an aircraft on the
ground for every hour it was in the air. To completely ignore
the men who did the preparatory job of getting that aircraft
ready for flight was a criminal waste.
I knew I could help provide this leadership myself and Iwas
only one of many senior noncoms who felt the same way. As
officers, we could pool our talents and help build a far more
efficient organization. Later in the war effort, this need was
recognized and many of these practices were instituted.
But on the Eve of 1942, I was fighting a very stern war
with only a specialized knowledge of aircraft in a land and
place where aircraft were fast becoming extinct. Not only were
we limited to a few outmoded planes, but our gasoline supply was
low, our facilities meager and our positions vulnerable. Help

-16-
was being promised, but those of us who could read a map,
speculate on the actual situation, and reason with even
rudimentary accuracy knew that we were going to have to fight
with what we had for a number of long, hungry months. We knew,
too, the alternatives were the salt mines of Manchuria or
solitary cells in a Japanese prison camp.
1942 was not an inviting year but we faced it, as do most
men facing any new year, with hope and optimism.
March Field, 1927
March Field, where I began 1941, had been a primary
flying school during World War I, had been closed after the
Armistice of 1918, and only reopened in 1927 for the same
purpose once again. I was assigned there as a raw recruit in the
late months of 1927, having enlisted at Ft. McArthur in San
Pedro.
I had served two years as an apprentice welder and
metalsmith for a civilian firm in Pasadena, California, from
1925-27. 1 was anxious to learn aircraft welding and had no
money to take training. A high school diploma was essential to
enlisting in the Army Air Corps and my graduation from Glendale
High School in 1925 got me over that hurdle.
My avowed intention was to stay in the Air Corps till I
had mastered the art of aircraft welding and then leave to enter
the aircraft industry. As a recruit, though, there was little
choice of jobs. I was put to washing wings, janitor work and KP
in my new home, the 47th School Squadron. I enjoyed the work and
liked the close companionship of the men with whom I served.
This was a whole new world, a fascinating one, and an exciting
one. When my yard-birding chores and my recruit training would
allow, I would get assigned to duty in the hangar to help work
on the planes. We had 30 or more PTls. They were a biplane built
by Consolidated Aircraft, powered by an eight cylinder, French
LeRhone engine. Our squadron also maintained the only transport
on the field, a Douglas DC1. This Liberty-engined, big biplane
was a development of the Douglas Round-the-World planes. It
would seem like a clumsy, underpowered and very puny cargo ship
by today's standards, but it was the only thing we had that
could carry more than two men and we were proud of her.
My first flight was a trip to San Diego in that flying
lettuce crate and we averaged something like 80 miles an hour
all the way there and back.
Our quarters at March Field were old WW I barracks,
wooden relics from a bygone day. We scrubbed and washed them
down regularly and they were comfortable. I learned the
rudiments of military discipline, the techniques of standing

-17-
inspection, the dos and don'ts for a recruit during those easy
early days. I learned to know and respect a number of men who
later proved my faith in them by becoming great leaders.
I learned, too, to take orders. On one occasion, while I
was reading in the recreation room, a noncommissioned officer
spoke to me sharply with an order to empty a spittoon that had
spilled over, clean up the mess and police the area. I told him
I did not think that was my job, saying, “There is an orderly to
take care of this room."
"Soldier," he said, "I didn't ask you to do the cleaning
of that spittoon. I told you to do it."
"Well," I said, in a somewhat churlish way, "I'm not
going to do it," adding insult to injury by concluding, "Do you
get me?" And then I realized I had made a mistake.
"Soldier," the sergeant said, "No, I don't get you but
I'm just fixing to." The sergeant peeled off his jacket, grabbed
me by the scruff of the neck and practically buried my face in
that spittoon. I not only cleaned the foul-smelling receptacle
and cleaned up the floor, but did a week's extra KP for my show
of insolence.
I learned very soon that the Squadron Commander was God,
the First Sergeant was only slightly removed from his right hand
and that all non-commissioned officers held at least the rank of
archangel. This may not have been a terribly efficient army, but
it was a good army and it was the best training ground for most
of the men who loved it as I did. I did love the military
service from the first day I enlisted right up to the present
time. There are faults, weaknesses, inefficiencies and blunders,
but its strengths far outshadow its deficiencies. A military
organization is a highly pragmatic organization. Results are
what count. You are judged by the results of your work.
Explanations and excuses are brushed away with a flick of the
wrist. If your airplane does not fly properly, you may kill a
man or a number of men. There is no in-between shadow area where
you blame someone else.
Retribution is sometimes swift, unbending and even unfair
in the military service but to those who live by the guidelines,
be they written or unwritten, it is a good life.
The Army Air Corps, of which I had become a part in those
closing days of 1927, had one great advantage: it was an
absolute necessity in the modern world. The Infantry didn't like
it, the Cavalry didn't like it, the Navy was against it and it
seemingly cost a great deal of money which made it unpopular
with the budget bureau. Still, for all its disadvantages and its
opponents, it was recognized as an absolute necessity to the
defense of the United States.

-18-
General Billy Mitchell and his boys had demonstrated
beyond a shadow of a doubt that an air arm could do things no
other branch of the military could do. It could get to an enemy
faster and with more firepower than either the Artillery or the
Cavalry and, while it cost a great deal to get it there and
demanded skills that were unknown in a non-flying army, it must
be tolerated.
As late as 1927 when I was inducted, we were still flying
World War I planes. We had at March Air Base some De Havilands
as well as many engines that had been built for WWI.
The officer and enlisted personnel, too, were somewhat
less than top drawer, that is in the eyes of the Big Brass in
Washington. The Air Corps was not the spit and polish brigade
the Army would like it to be nor was it addicted to the "50mission
flop" as it became in 1945. * It was an organization
suspended between two worlds. Some of our officers were bright,
alert, energetic hustlers determined to go places and do things.
Others were hand-me-downs from a WWI army, attracted to a peacetime
Air Corps by the flight pay, 50% above base pay.
We had our good officers and our bad ones. We also had
good non-commissioned officers and slovenly ones. As we used to
say, though, "An Army can be as bad as its officers but it can
only be as good as its noncoms."
Many of our officers wanted only to fly and cared little
about anything else. Others were trying to make the Air Corps
into a flying Infantry outfit. Neither succeeded to any great
degree. I remember the story of Lieutenant McGinnis, a very
military young officer with an exaggerated opinion of his own
importance. As he entered Headquarters one morning, he almost
bumped into Captain Pierce as he came rushing out of the
building on his way to a meeting. Lieutenant McGinnis saluted
sharply. Captain Pierce waved his hand airily and said,
"Morning, McGinnis," and went on. Lieutenant McGinnis stopped
short and called out, "Captain Pierce, I saluted you in a
military manner and I expect a salute in return."
Captain Pierce, taken aback by this unexpected reprimand
just looked back over his shoulder and said, "Oh, come on
McGinnis, you kiss my ass."
Lieutenant McGinnis, his feathers ruffled, went on up to
the Base Adjutant's office and reported what had happened. The
adjutant, with something of a sigh, knew he had one of those
problems that needed solving and, reaching for the phone, called
Captain Pierce.
* During World War II it was considered distinguished to wear a torn
flight jacket and cap over the ears.

-19-
By the time Captain Pierce arrived and reported to the
adjutant, Lieutenant McGinnis was still fuming.
"I have heard of the incident on the steps of
Headquarters this morning," said the adjutant to Pierce. "I
think you owe Lieutenant McGinnis an apology."
Captain Pierce looked at the adjutant and then at
McGinnis and rubbed his chin for only a minute or so. Then he
said, 'Yes, Lieutenant McGinnis, I guess I do owe you an
apology. I've changed my mind. I wouldn't let you kiss my ass."
With that, he saluted the adjutant, turned on his heel
and walked out of the office. It is ironic to say that Captain
Pierce, a fine officer, was killed in an aircraft accident not
too long afterward and Lieutenant McGinnis, also a fine officer,
became a general as he moved up the promotion ladder.
This problem of the flying officer who subordinated
everything to his flight duties and the officer who put
discipline ahead of every other consideration was always with
us. We had some officers who took their flight training after
completing four years at West Point, and we had more who got
their commissions after a year of primary and basic training at
Randolph Field and Kelly Field in Texas. March Field was opened
the middle of 1927 as a primary training school where cadets
trained for eight months before going on to Kelly for basic and
advanced training.
Our enlisted personnel also ran the gamut from boys
fascinated by the work on aircraft and all the intricate jobs
they involved to many who had spent years as cavalrymen. We had
many good ones and some bad ones. We had our share of
alcoholics, gamblers and shirkers. I remember one very good
hospital administrative assistant who spent almost 20 years as
an enlisted man, but lived very well with his wife on the money
he earned from running a poker game for several weeks out of
each month.
There were also boys like Cowboy Henyon. Cowboy was a
tall, lean Texan who could never have been a really snappy
soldier had he spent 50 years in the Infantry. His uniforms were
always baggy, always loose and sloppy. Still, Cowboy (and he was
called Cowboy because he had really been a cowboy on the range
in Texas) was steady, a good gardener and a good sentry. Now,
while it seems that being a good gardener or a good sentry is no
great asset, it surely can be. When you put Cowboy out on a
section of the Base to see that nothing went wrong, you could
depend on nothing going far wrong.
One night Cowboy was walking sentry duty on the hangar
line. He had no regular schedule and, I imagine, he spent much
of his time just sitting in the shadows watching his duty area.
When the Officer of the Day came out looking for the sentry,

-20-
Cowboy challenged him and made the Officer advance to a light to
be recognized. This was a formality and it was duly
accomplished. Cowboy, who was armed only with a pistol held his
piece at what was called "present arms”--sideways in front of
him. The Officer of the Day said, "Let me see your piece."
Cowboy handed the gun over willingly.
The Officer, a youngish fellow took the gun and said,
"Now, soldier, you have done the one thing a sentry should never
do. You have given away the only thing you have to protect your
duty section."
Cowboy only grinned a very little grin and, reaching
inside his great coat, pulled out a big six-gun with a barrel at
least a foot long. "That one," said Cowboy, "ain't loaded, but
this one is."
There is one other incident concerning a sentry I might
mention here, too. This involves a soldier named Lowe. Lowe,
like Henyon, seemed to have no marketable technical s kills
useful to the Air Corps. He could not weld or work a lathe or
change engines in an airplane. Unlike Cowboy, though, Lowe
looked very much like a soldier. He stood a good six feet tall,
was what one might c all "Square rigged." He had big square
shoulders, a fine, upright posture and a boxy frame. When the
organization turned out for a parade formation, Lowe was always
one of the better looking soldiers. He was also a very good
sentry. Because of his imperturbable English calm and his good
appearance, he was usually assigned to the Main Gate, the face
the Air Corps turned toward the civilian world.
One day when Lowe's turn for guard duty came up and he
was assigned to the Main Gate, the Officer of the Day issued a
written order to the effect that no Army blankets should leave
the Base in automobiles. All blankets found in cars were to be
picked up and their owners given receipts. It seems that someone
had been stealing blankets and peddling them in town.
Lowe duly examined every car that came through his gate.
When he found a blanket, he signed a receipt and identified the
blanket and stowed it for checking.
A certain Captain Anderson drove up to the gate in his
car. Lowe noticed an Army blanket in the back seat.
"I am sorry, sir," said Lowe, "My orders are that you
cannot take that blanket off the Base."
"Oh, that's alright," said Captain Anderson. "I bought the
blanket at the Quartermasters. It is my personal property."
"I am sorry, sir," said Lowe, taking out his note pad and
pencil. "My orders are that no blankets leave the Base."
"Now listen sentry," said Captain Anderson. "In the first
place that is my personal property and in the second place, I
don't let privates tell me what I can do."

-21-
"I'm not telling you what you can do," said Lowe. "I'm
telling you what you can't do," and Lowe snatched the blanket
out of the car and saluted.
Early in 1928, I was called into the orderly room and
informed that I was going to be a cook in the squadron mess. My
experience as a steward in a construction camp prior to entering
the service had come to light. There was a shortage of cooks;
ergo, Montgomery would become a cook. This was not a bad job as
jobs go in the service, but I had not come to the Air Corps to
cook. That personal whim was given slight consideration by the
First Sergeant, though. I reported to the kitchen the next
morning as a cook's helper and served breakfast. About
midmorning I got another call from the orderly room. This time
the First Sergeant looked me over carefully before telling me I
had been transferred to the 70th Service Squadron and would
report there immediately. He must have been very curious about
my strength at Headquarters, but he did not convey his thoughts
to me. I was as much in the dark about the move as he was, too.
I found out very quickly, though. Several men had either been
injured or sick in the welding shop and my qualifications had
been noted on the records. I was being transferred to the
welding shop. I had learned just enough about the military
system not to utter a peep one way or another. True, I had told
the welding shop foreman that I knew something about the
business. Just who it was who saved me from being a cook, I
shall never know. To this day, though, I owe him a great debt.
I was not a very good welder in those early days, but I had
a solid foundation. Working with lightweight metals was new to
me and I worked hard to master the techniques. I could handle
tools, read blueprints and loved the work. It was not long
before my proficiency improved.
I got some books on welding and began to study. When an
examination came up for higher rating, I took it and passed with
good grades. I did not have enough service to hold the rating
even though my marks had been highest of those qualifying. Then,
just to point out the old adage that opportunity by the forelock
is the only way to advancement, they changed the service
requirement and I was promoted. Though still a private, I was
drawing staff sergeant's pay.
During the 1920s and 1930s, I was placed on Flying pay from
time to time. This Flying status was essentially Hazard pay
given to personnel closely connected with flying. It consisted
of a bonus of 50% of base pay and was a highly desirable adjunct
to our meager salary. It was only seldom that my work gave me
access to such pay and to those of us in aircraft maintenance it
was just enough to lend a boost in morale. Flying status was

-22-
given regularly to all pilots and flight crews and others
closely connected with the hangar line.
This did not mean that the 4 hours required for flight
status was the only times I flew, though. In my early years in
the Air Corps, I would fly anywhere with anyone at any time. I
was a member of a Primary Flying school Squadron for some time
and we had a number of Primary trainers, PT1 and PT3. They were
slow, open cockpit jobs with a speed of about 75 miles an hour.
They were pretty rugged pieces of equipment, though, and to my
naive and adventurous soul, they were wonderful.
During the time I was crew chief on one of these flying egg
crates, as they were called, I had as pilot, a Captain who had a
girl friend in San Francisco. Each Saturday morning, we would
take off for the 4 hours or more of flight to the Bay City from
March Field at Riverside. I would get to fly a part of the time
and fancied myself no less expert than Charles Lindberg. Upon
arrival at Crissy Field in San Francisco, my pilot would airily
wave his hand and say, "See you at 2 o'clock tomorrow
afternoon." and be off on his social rounds.
I, with a total of twenty-five cents or maybe half a buck,
would first tend the plane, check into the barracks for a bunk
and head off for town. I was, in my eyes a very important
person, having just flown in from the South. I walked the hilly
streets of San Francisco in the fog and rain until my feet
ached. Then I would head back to the barracks and get supper in
the messhall. I sat at Fisherman's Wharf and even bought a
portion of crab when I was flush.
On Sunday, I would wheel the plane out of the hangar and
polish up the wings, check the engine over and wait. About 2 or
3 o'clock, my pilot would show up with his girl friend, we would
warm up the old crate and be off, our silken mufflers trailing
in the wind in the best devil-may-care fashion.
During these early days of my military career, I flew with
such men as Lt. Jimmie Doolittle and Major Henry Arnold. I
believe I enjoyed flying with my Engineering officer, Lt. Barney
Giles, most of all, though. He was always trying some new
gimmick. On one occasion, he had me design and build a special
gasoline tank for the undercarriage of a Primary trainer. Then,
climbing to 7000 feet or so, Giles would flip the trainer over
on its back and see how long he could maintain inverted flight.
With the gasoline tank on the undercarriage, he got the gravity
flow that was necessary to supply the engine with fuel. We would
fly upside down to a couple of thousand feet and then do it all
over again. I well remember when we tried this trick with a
larger plane, though, and the gasoline cap had not been securely
fastened. We both got a facefull of gasoline.

-23-
During all these flights, I can remember only a couple of
times when danger threatened. On a trip from Kansas City to Fort
Leavenworth, some 30 miles or so up the Frozen Missouri River
one cold February day, we lost all our oil pressure and the
pilot called me on the phone where I sat in the front cockpit
and said he was going back to KC.
He climbed to about 1000 feet from the very low altitude we
had been skimming over the frozen river and headed back to
sanctuary. As we made our turn and began the glide down to the
snow packed runway, the engine froze up. It was as though a huge
dog had us in his grip and was shaking very hard. We just
managed to get over the dike that protects the strip from the
Mississippi River and jolted to a halt with a dead stick. The
engine had gotten so hot that the pistons were partially melted.
We found out that we had broken an oil line at takeoff and
been pumping oil out at 80 pounds pressure. It was a week before
we got a new engine and got back to our trip East.
There was another time while taking off from San Diego when
the engine coughed a few times as we were under full power and
just heading out over the second line of breakers. We were lucky
and the engine caught on.
It was always fascinating for me to see places I had read
about and seen in pictures. It those days, there was a great
deal of romance connected with such flying as going down into
Grand Canyon and flying into Yosemite Valley and hedgehopping at
10 feet for miles and miles over the desert wastes of Mojave and
Death Valley.
Those of us who flew regularly, though, were always very
leery of a careless pilot. Once in awhile we would get one. I
remember coming home from a trip to San Francisco with a Major
one night. The Fresno tower had informed us that a TWA passenger
plane was heading north at 5000 feet on the right side of the
radio beam course. This was his assigned place. We, flying
south, should have been on our right side of that beam just as a
car is driven on the right side of the road. We were supposed to
be flying at an even altitude as well.
My pilot was tinkering with his radio and not being careful
about his position. He was flying at 5000 feet one minute and at
4000 feet another. He was wandering all over the beam, too. I
expected any minute to see the wing lights of that TWA transport
loom up ahead of us. If it ever got that close, I knew it was
too late to do anything. Even at 150 miles an hour, two planes
close very fast when flying head on.
Somehow we missed, though, and got home without a problem.
That pilot did lose himself not too long afterward, though and
went down in Mexico when he ran out of gas.

-24-
As I have said, my flying days were not extensive. After
the glamour wore off, flying bored me. There was little to do
but study the maps and the weather charts. I always took along
reading material and during one year, memorized the Constitution
of the United States while on trips.
We always managed to have fun and we did see a great many
places. I do remember flying with a bomber that was doing tow
target work for the Artillery at Fort Huachuca in Southern
Arizona.
Fort Huachuca had been established during the Indian Wars
and seen a variety of military organizations come and go. At the
time I was there for a brief couple of hours, it was staffed by
a Negro outfit. That is, all the enlisted personnel were Negro
and the officers white. This was the typical organization of the
few Negro regiments in the U. S. Army at the time. We had towed
a target all morning while the Regimental Artillery fired its
practice course. At noon, we landed and while the officers went
to the Officer's mess we enlisted men of the crew went to the
mess hall for lunch. We had been sitting at 10,000 feet all
morning in the cold and noisy belly of the bomber watching the
flack from the white marker shells burst around our target some
2000 yards to our rear. We were ready for conversation and
exercise. We began talking and laughing and digging into the
very good food that had been provided at our special table. All
the other men in the room were Negro. Within a very few minutes,
there was a blast from a whistle and a huge Negro First Sergeant
stood up in his immaculate uniform.
"For the benefit of the visiting airmen, I will explain the
rule of conduct in the messhall," said this very authoritive
figure. "You may say 'Please pass', otherwise quiet will prevail
at all times."
With this dictum laid on the line, the deathly silence of
Fort Huachuca once more settled over the mess hall.
It was this sort of iron discipline that gave the isolated
Fort its high desertion rate and its bad name all over the
country.
Many a black man deserted from Huachuca and turned in at
March Field to serve his time with the comment that the
Guardhouse at March was far better than active duty at Fort
Huachuca. *
We did have Indians, Mexican-Americans, Filipinos and some
of the brown skinned peoples but no Negroes. I well remember
knowing a few full-blooded Indians who were invariably called
"Chief." Some of them were quite dark and undoubtedly had Negro
* No part of the Army was integrated as far as Negroes were concerned
prior to WWII.

-25-
blood but as long as the Indian characteristics of high
cheekbones and certain other identification pre-dominated, there
was no comment.
One of the outstanding noncommissioned officers I knew was
Master Sgt. Tupper, a full-blooded Cherokee. Tupper was quite
black but he was also very capable and personable.
Another Cherokee I knew only by observation, Lt. Col.
Tinker. Col. Tinker later was promoted to General and was lost
in the Battle of Midway.
I first learned about General Tinker's death through a
friend I met sometime after the war at the Naval Hospital in San
Diego. He was being treated for an ailment and we met in the
hall one day.
This retired soldier told me of his war experiences and his
retirement in 1947 or so. He was retired as a Technical
Sergeant. I knew that he had been of higher rank and wondered
what the demotion meant.
He told me the following story.
In 1942, I was promoted to Warrent Officer and transferred
to Hickam Field in Hawaii. I was assigned as in charge of the
Engineering repair shops.
One day General Tinker came into the shop and discussed
with me the possibility of taking some of the gasoline tanks out
of a B24 and installing additional bomb racks. Finally, after we
explored the possibilities, General Tinker told me to go ahead
with the job.
"It will shorten our range but it will give us a lot more
fire-power," said the General.
Very soon after this work had been accomplished and the
plane flight tested, came news of a big battle in the offing,
the Japanese attack on Midway.
During that battle, General Tinker and his crew took off
with a full bomb load in the remodeled B24 and was effective in
bombing units of the Japanese fleet. He ran out of gasoline on
the way home and was lost with all his crew on the homeward
journey.
In the investigation of the incident that took place later,
I was called to testify and mentioned that the plane had been
modified. I was asked for the written orders for the
modification and told the Board of Inquiry that the orders were
oral orders.
As a result of this oversight on my part, I was reduced
from Warrent Officer to the Technical Sergeant and was never
again promoted.

About Flying and Getting Scared
-26-
Most flying was stimulating, exhilarating and fun. It was
romantic, especially to a young fellow with few romantic
experiences. There were times though, when I was thoroughly
terrified. I can still recall a Summery and very dark night on a
flight from Albuquerque to Denver. We had been caught in the
grip of one of those severe mountain thunderstorms with
electrical displays completely surrounding us. Great, jagged
flashes of fire rent the night sky asunder. I could catch
momentary glimpses of great rock walls on either side of our B18
as we were forced to fly down below the peaks. They seemed close
enough to grasp as we thundered headlong through that canyon.
Then, with a great crackle and popping that I could sense more
than hear, long tongues of flame began flying off the tips of
the 2 propellers and huge balls of blue fire went rolling off
the wing tips. A thousand possibilities and alternatives raced
through my mind. The rocky crags of that canyon, the certainty
of a crash, the ice and snow we were sure to encounter. I tried
to control myself in order to do what would be the best for
survival. I was sure the ship was afire, either struck by
lightening or by some other twist of Fate.
I clawed my way forward to the control cockpit to be with
others of the crew when we bailed out, my hand already on the
ripcord of my parachute. The pilot and the co-pilot were calmly
easing the big ship through the violent updrafts and sudden wind
shifts. The crew chief was standing in back of the pilot with
little apparent concern. He quickly sensed my terror and soothed
my tenseness by telling me that this static electricity, this
St. Elmo's fire was a gaudy but relatively harmless phenomenon.
We were soon to break through the front and had already
asked for landing instructions at Denver.
Within a few minutes, we did clear the last of the
turbulence and floated out onto a placid ocean of cool night air
with the distant lights of Denver glowing with reassurance in
the distance.
Never again did I see so gaudy and spectacular display of
Nature's whims. I had seen Dante's Inferno and it had shaken me
to the very core of my being.
At the time of entry into the Amy Air Corps in 1927, the
Service was using second and even third generation planes. Gone
were the JN4D (Jennies) of WWI, the Rotary engines developed by
the French and most other vintage aircraft. We still did have
some deHaviland, the English designed plane that had done great
duty late in WWI. It was powered by a 400 Horse power Liberty
Engine. This engine, though, was obsolete and had been

-27-
condemned, in effect, by Congress who had specifically
prohibited the use of any money spent on its rehabilitation.
So, with better engineering, more modern design, the
application of newer concepts and the emergence of dynamic
aircraft manufacturers, we were getting better and safer planes.
We still had a D.C.l, a Douglas plane with the capacity for
10 persons and powered with that same Liberty Engine. We were
soon to get tri-motor Fords and Fokkers.
At March Field, where I was stationed, we had mostly
primary trainers built by Consolidated Aircraft, then of
Buffalo, New York. The PT1 was powered with a Le Rhone engine
but it was soon replaced by a PT3 with a Wright Whirlwind, the
same engine Lindberg had flown the Atlantic with.
This was the first of the great radial engines that
dominated the Army Air Corps and Naval Air for the next 20
years. It was economical, had a good weight to horsepower ratio
and was reasonably easy to work on. A radial engine could be
expected to run 300-400 hours or more between overhauls.
Horsepower was still our biggest problem, though. Engineers
always designed pretty close to the top 1imits of the engine
that was to go into the plane. Military aircraft did have more
power tolerance than most planes but they were still woefully
underpowered by today's standards.
Still, accidents due to mechanical failure were few. One of
the first accidents I knew of involved engine failure, that of a
Liberty engine in a deHaviland. Our squadron commander had
engine failure on a flight to Tucson, landed on the desert and
was killed when the plane nosed over into a gully.
I remember that another Squadron commander, Captain Harper
and his crew chief flew into a power line while skimming the
waters of Lake Hodges in San Diego County and the crew chief was
killed. Captain Harper survived.
One of the men who had enlisted with me at Fort McArthur,
San Pedro, was killed when he failed to jump from a Primary
trainer that refused to recover from a dive. The pilot left the
plane but the mechanic either did not sense the danger or froze
up.
I was flying with a young pilot out on the nearby desert
one day when he dove on a railroad crew working on a track
detail. We swooped very low over the tracks and were delighted
to see the men all fall flat as we passed. On the third pass,
though, one of the men did not fall flat. He merely stood
upright and tossed a brick as high in the air as he could. We
were just pulling out of our dive at perhaps 20 feet or so and
that brick suddenly appeared in the air just in front of us. It
seemed to hang there for half an hour before it began to

-28-
descend. We did not do any more diving on any more railroad
crews.
There were always accidents in landing, too. Pilots were
constantly forgetting to lower their landing gear. Their
concentration on the approach pattern, the turn point and the
traffic. In one aircraft, the handle that actuated the flare
release was close to a similar handle that let the wheels down.
We dropped a lot of flares from that model.
Night flying was becoming a regular thing in the late 20s
and I well remember one plane coming in for a routine landing.
The pilot taxied up to the hangar and said, "You better take a
look at that right wing. It felt like I hit a fence post as I
made my approach."
We found a man's head imbedded in the leading edge of the
wing. It was the head of a doctor who went horseback riding each
evening. He had been warned to stay away from the landing strip
but had not heeded the warning.
With the thousands of hours flown, though, there were
relatively few fatal accidents. As a matter of fact, we usually
lost more men to vehicular accidents at March Field than to
aircraft. I suppose because men in flying machines were
constantly alerted to the dangers they faced, they were more
careful.
In early 1929, I got orders to go to school. This first of
many schools I attended was a tremendous thrill. I was to go by
train from March Field to Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois,
where my class would take place. It would take me away from
March for almost a year.
The months at Chanute Field, the Army Air Corps Technical
School, were a wonderful revelation to me. I loved the work in
General Machine Shop practice, Welding and, after I had
qualified, Advanced Welding. By the time I returned to March in
1930, I felt I was well on the way to becoming a good journeyman
welder.
For short periods after that first stint of technical
schooling, I spent shorter periods working in factories, going
to junior colleges and specialized courses of study and work
with major overhaul at San Diego.
Promotion
Not only did my pay increase, but I was promoted first from
private to corporal, then sergeant, then staff and technical
sergeant. I spent a great deal of time working on the
development of new tools, special metals and with unique
techniques. It was fascinating and wonderful work. I loved not
only the work but the manifold duties of being an Air Corps

-29-
soldier. I came to know such men as Lieutenant Colonel Henry
Arnold, Major Tooey Spaatz, Lieutenant Barney Giles and many
others. I made long, sometimes tedious flights that had an aura
of romance about them. I learned to work with good men and bad,
efficient officers and dunderheads. I got married in 1934 and
began to feel that my life had a purpose.
My interest in managing baseball and basketball teams
during the 1930s gave me a wholly new perspective. This last job
was thrust on me in typically army fashion one evening as I lay
on my bunk reading. The captain of our basketball team walked
into the barracks and said, "Hey, Montgomery, I need someone to
manage this basketball team."
"Well," said I, “You just got yourself a boy." Off and on
for the next ten years, I worked with Charlie Graw. Charlie
handled the team when it was on the playing floor. I did all the
leg work arranging games, buying uniforms, scheduling
transportation and keeping statistics. Charlie and I were
unbeatable. We won many a March Field championship.
We played all the surrounding towns, made trips to other
Air Bases and developed good teams and a fine group of boys. All
this, of course, was in addition to our regular duties. It was
Charlie Graw and the help from some of those basketball and
baseball players I managed who, more than once, saved my life
during the hard days of prison camp.
When baseball season rolled around, I was tabbed to manage
that, too. So, for a number of years, my spare time was taken up
with these fascinating sports. I was never much of a tactician
and I learned games slowly. We did win our share of games and
played for fun, though.
As time went on, I was placed in charge of the welding shop
with some 25 welders to supervise. A little later this
responsibility was increased to being in charge of the whole
machine shop at March Field. This encompassed the welding,
machine tools, sheet metal, cabinet shop, as well as propellers,
paint department and electrical section. The shop had never been
run the way I had learned to expect in my experience with
production shops in civilian life and in aircraft factories. Nor
was it anywhere nearly as careful about quality as the Air Corps
Depot shops where I had taken training. I made a number of
changes which, I hoped, would upgrade the work. All finished
work, for instance, was to be passed on by a qualified
inspector. All work was to be painted and delivered where
possible. Records were to be kept on each man's performance and
efficiency. These factors had an influence on morale. When good
work is expected, good work results. Men do not like to see that
their work has been rejected by an inspector. They will be more

-30-
careful. The inspector answered only to me and his word was
final.
Probably the most dominant engineering officer I had was a
Colonel Hackett. He was neither a great engineer, a good
designer, nor even an exceptional leader. He did have a knack
for organization, though. That is what we needed at the time. He
had a tendency to pound the desk, base his decisions on
irrational criteria, and use men from time to time for his own
personal work on guns.
Still, Colonel Hackett fought for better working conditions
and better tools. I think he felt I was doing a good job in the
machine shop, respected me, and let me alone.
One day he came in, as was his custom, stood in the center
aisle between the machines and just looked around for perhaps
ten minutes. That particular morning every department seemed to
be using compressed air for some job. The blast furnace was
going in the foundry. The painter was spraying with a large
nozzle. The cabinet shop was using air to carry off shavings
from its machines. The sheet metal department was having trouble
getting enough air to work their rivet guns in the repair of
aircraft cowling. When the Colonel asked me about the
deficiency, I pointed out the drains being made on the big
compressor in the pump room. I also pointed out that the garage,
which also drew on the air supply, was probably pulling off a
considerable portion.
"Montgomery," he said, "Tell one of your welders to go out
with a torch and welding outfit and cut that line to the garage
and weld it up. We have had those garage people stealing our air
long enough."
This had been a bone of contention for a long time. The
garage always used a lot of our air for hoists, grease guns, and
otherwise. Their peak needs always seemed to coincide with ours.
I would have been very glad to oblige the Colonel and cut that
line.
I said, "Yes, sir, Colonel."
Then, going to my desk, I got a pad of paper and put it
down in front of the Colonel and said, "Will you put that order
in writing, Colonel?"
"Why should I put it in writing?" said he.
"Well," I said, "That line is Quartermaster property and I
don't want to cut it without written authority."
"Montgomery," he said, "I gave you a direct order to cut
that air line and I want it cut right now."
"I am only too glad to cut it," said I, "I just want the
order in writing."

-31-
"Montgomery," he said, "I am not going to put that in
writing but I am giving you another direct order to have that
line cut."
I knew that legally and militarily I was on firm ground in
insisting on a written order. I knew, too, that Colonel Hackett
was not a man to cross. He was well thought of by such men as
General Arnold and many other high ranking pilots with whom he
had served. He could break me with a squiggle of his pen. He
could, as a matter of fact, destroy my military career. I still
felt that what he was demanding was a more dangerous course of
action than the alternative. I stood my ground and the Colonel
finally stalked out, his red neck bristling and his lips
compressed into a thin line.
I did not cut the air off to the garage but I went about
the rest of that morning's work momentarily expecting an MP
would come in with a confinement order.
The MP never came but a messenger did. He had a note from
Colonel Hackett's secretary which said, "Be on the hangar line
at 9 A.M. tomorrow morning. We both need a change. We can fly to
Sacramento and plan that big hoist job coming up next week."
As far as I know that was the end of my defiance of Colonel
Hackett and the air line. Neither of us ever mentioned it again
and I worked for him for several years longer.
As far as I know, too, that air line is still in operation.
Early in 1941, Colonel Hackett asked me if I would like to
transfer with him as his shop superintendent to open a new air
base at Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had been at March a long time
and welcomed the change. In April of that year, we made the
move.
Kirtland Air Base
Kirtland Air Base at Albuquerque was being built on a mesa
slightly north and east of the city. That portion of the mesa
not occupied by the municipal airport was taken up, graded,
ditched, paved and developed. It was a large, sprawling
installation about a mile in altitude, dusty from the afternoon
winds, the loose dirt from the grading work and the uprooted
sagebrush. One hangar, a headquarters building, some shop areas
and a few other installations had been built by the time we
arrived. There was also a small housing area where the senior
noncommissioned officers were given quarters. The men lived in
barracks on the base.
Any new military installation is a headache. There are so
many things left undone, so few men to do them and a new
commanding officer anxious to complete the job. We worked early
and late, at a number of jobs, weekends and nights. As the

-32-
noncom in charge of engineering, I had my crew doing such things
as building fences, constructing garbage racks, repairing
aircraft and mounting guard.
Not long after our arrival, Colonel Hackett called me in to
say, "Montgomery, I want you to form a baseball team to play in
the Albuquerque town league."
I said, "Colonel, I have 200 men doing about 100 jobs
already and---" that's as far as I got.
"Bring in the list next Friday of what you will need," was
his answer.
So, the Kirtland Air Base Baseball team got its beginning.
Some of the boys had played baseball for me before. Some were
recruits and some just wanted to play baseball. We practiced at
nights under the lights of a new baseball field in the rapidly
expanding town of Albuquerque. Though we were hardly used to
each other in the ten days we had, we were unlucky to draw lots
as one of the teams to play in the opening game. Colonel Hackett
and his staff would be there representing the base. All the town
officials were on hand. I kept my fingers crossed that we would
not look too bad.
There is nothing that stirs my blood like a little band
music, the excitement of an opening game and the bright lights
shining on the diamond. My boys played very well. They did go
into the 9th inning with the score only 3-2 against them. Then
two men quickly struck out. The third man got on. The next man
up, a lanky Texan with a loose, easy stance at the plate, took a
mighty swing at the ball and knocked it over the fence to win
the game.
I don't know how Colonel Hackett felt, but I was delighted.
That team, which never did seem to be a very good team,
continued to win ball games like that all season. They had that
something needed to salvage a victory when the chips were down.
They played baseball for fun and they played hard, driving ball.
We went through that Albuquerque league and on to the State
finals, where we lost out by a fluke. A boy on the opposing
team, who had been a sucker all year for a fastball, got around
on one and poled it over the fence.
By this time, it was early September and "move" was in the
air. The war in Europe was going badly. The situation in the
Pacific was being described as "grave". The B17s stationed at
Albuquerque were the prime offensive force of the United States.
We were a part of that 19th Bombardment Group. I was called in
one day and ordered to prepare our equipment for overseas. The
only other information I got was that the destination was
"tropical." That could mean anything from Hawaii, Guam, Fiji,
Australia, to the Philippines. By a process of deduction, we
guessed that the Philippines were the most likely. Clark Air

-33-
Base, Pampango, P.I., was the most strategic air base in the
whole of the Orient. Our 35 B17s there would be something of a
deterrent to Japanese ambitions.
Toward the end of September, we boarded a special train in
Albuquerque and headed for San Francisco. After a few days at
Angel Island, we boarded ship, the Holcomb, and set sail. That
trip to Hawaii, the first leg of our journey, was no picnic. The
weather was double foul. With a full complement of men in the
hold and high seas running, we had probably as smelly a ship as
ever sailed out into the Pacific. Men were lying in the narrow
passageways moaning with anguish, their retchings of vomit and
filth slopping up and down the aisles. Other, in the holds,
bunks stacked five high, were trying valiantly to assist one
another in cleaning up the mess. Men were praying that the ship
would sink, would be torpedoed or just hit an iceberg. With our
heavy passenger list, we had extra liferafts topside. Several of
these were dislodged in the heavy seas and were simply lashed
down to prevent their loss. Even the crew did not attempt to
replace them in those angry days of mountainous waves.
As one of the senior noncoms, I shared a fine cabin with
two others. We ate in the first-class dining room around a table
for eight, we had our own waiter, and lived about as high on the
military hog as we ever had. The food was wonderful. We also
managed to have sandwiches served in our rooms each night for
our friends who were not so fortunate as we. We arranged, too,
for showers for the boys who had to live in that hot, putrid
atmosphere below decks. It lasted for four days. Then, in the
quiet rainbowed evening, we s lid into Honolulu and docked next
to the Aloha Tower. Only the officers and a few of us ranking
noncoms were allowed ashore, and these for only three hours.
Too, we had a cruiser escort, practiced blackout at night
and were careful not to dispose of even a gumwrapper overboard.
The pressure was building up. War, we knew, was in the offing.
We did not know when or where it would strike but we felt we
could handle any slight dislocation it might cause. We were
cocky, confident, even brash. We looked forward to setting up
the strongest bomber force the United States could muster,
maintaining it and keeping its security intact. We had very
little concept of the tremendous forces that were involved and
the forces lined up against us.

CHAPTER III
CLARK AIR BASE, PAMPANGA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
-34-
Clark Air Base, some 60 km north of Manila on the Island of
Luzon, was located on the Fort Stotsenberg Military reservation.
It was not a really well developed base, having only one runway,
slightly downhill and aiming directly at Mt. Arayat. It was,
however, the biggest American Air Base in the Orient. Ft.
Stotsenberg, the Philippine Scout Headquarters, was immediately
adjacent to the north. This longtime post was a succession of
three shaded avenues, parade grounds, rows of hibiscus, their
bright red blossoms leaving splashes of color against the
verdant green. This Cavalry and Artillery Base was established
about the turn of the 20th century and had been well manicured
by generations of recruits ever since. Its lawns were wide and
well cut. Its flower gardens were vistas of loveliness. The big
acacia trees arched over the roads and pathways to form an
arboreal splendor. The officers' quarters were old, wideverandaed,
wooden homes with screened porches, moss-covered
roofs and an air of somnolent grace and ease. Nothing, it
seemed, ever moved very quickly at Ft. Stotsenberg.
The Philippine Scouts quartered there were a contingent of
the military establishment of the United States. They received
half the pay of American soldiers, a very good wage in the
Orient. As one of the most highly prized positions in the
Philippines, vacancies in the Scouts were filled from a long
list of applicants. Most of those who enlisted stayed on to
retire with 30 years of service. The Scouts were the cream of
the Filipino populace, mostly tall, well-conditioned men.
This same base exists today as part of the U. S. Air Force
which has taken it under lease as a part of the new Clark Air
Force Base installation.
The Clark Field of 1941 was a far different military
establishment, though. The hangars were flimsy, corrugated metal
structures. There were a few two-story barracks buildings, a
movie theater and a series of bamboo shelters for the new
arrivals. The bamboo structures were built with an eye to
comfort, though. In the warm, humid climate, the open sides of
the buildings let a maximum of air through to maintain a decent
temperature.
There was one row of hangars down the upper section of the
strip and another row of support shops, supply and maintenance
buildings adjacent to them.
My crew had just come from a base where a normal working
day was only limited by the amount of work to be done. They had
been trained in a busy demanding school. We were to share the

-35-
engineering shop with men who had been stationed at Clark for
several years. I was placed in charge of the whole operation. To
my consternation and surprise, I found the old-timers coming to
work anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour late each morning,
puttering around for a couple of hours and taking off for an
hour of coffee. When they returned from coffee hour, the
puttering would continue till 11:30 when they would pack up
their tools and go home to lunch, supposedly finished for the
day. This, it seems, had been the accepted pace for years.
While I had nominal charge of these men, they were from
another engineering outfit and felt little allegiance to my
orders; it took me only a few days to decide that they would all
have to go. I talked with my Engineering Officer, Captain
Fairfield, and he made arrangements for this crew to work under
their own supervisors in another part of the field. My crew
would take care of our B17s. It was a much happier arrangement
and the slothful practices of the past did not contaminate my
men. We set up three shifts that kept the shop open 24 hours if
necessary. B17s are not toys. They take a lot of maintenance and
we were trained to do the work. My boys had a willing spirit,
knowledge of the peculiarities of the planes we were handling
and enough equipment to do a good job.
Our planes arrived from the States by the time we had been
at Clark a week. These 37 B17s, along with the fighters,
miscellaneous air-craft, and other rolling stock, kept us busy
all day and most of the night. I was able to get away only one
weekend for a trip to Manila. I was not entranced with that
large, cosmopolitan city. As in most cities of the Orient or,
for that matter, large cities in any hemisphere, there were
areas of beauty, magnificent views and stately buildings. More
than most, though, Manila had its squalor, poverty and filth.
Undoubtedly there were those among the enlisted personnel who
made friends with good families, sought out the quiet, more-orless
intellectual pleasures of the tropics and benefitted from
their leisure time. On our first trip to Manila, though, we knew
only of the spots the old-timers had lauded with high praise,
the tropical version of the Gin Mills. We made the rounds of the
more blatant honky-tonks, danced with the Filipino "B" girls and
drank rum and Coke. It was not far different from New York or
Chicago in these respects. There are always places where a
fellow with a few bucks can get drunk, find a girl, or eat a
meal. There were, it seemed, just more of these places in Manila
than anywhere else on earth. This rich, thriving port city
always had its share of tourists, seamen and wanderers. There
seemed to be no limits, no dampers, no matter what the excesses.
It was a city of intrigue. As one of the better known
crossroads of the world, its air was heavy with information

-36-
seekers, agents and girls looking for information. When I told
one girl in a Russian night club I was an Army Air Corps man she
poo-pooed the statement, saying, 9"Yu don't have a wrist band
on. You are not Air Corps." She had spotted that fact even
though I had on a long-sleeved shirt. In this particular place,
located on the Dewey Blvd., waterfront, we gathered around a
small table in the middle of a large room of similar small
tables. There were scores of attractive Russian girls going from
table to table, chatting, laughing and making friends. Some of
the girls stayed to talk. When the waiter brought a round of
drinks, he would put the "chit" in a glass in the center of the
table. While the drinks were inexpensive, it did not take long
for the chits to amount to a goodly sum. If you stayed long, it
might amount to $40 or so, as ours did. When I began to examine
the chits in the glass one of the boys, who had invited us there
in the first place, just brushed my hand aside, saying, "Don't
bother. Before we pay the bill, I just take out half of the
chits and stuff them in my pocket."
No self-respecting business establishment can operate on
this type of larceny, and I began to realize that this was set
up as a listening post for some foreign embassy. When soldiers
and sailors gather together for an evening on the town they talk
shop, ship movements, personnel transfers and tales of greater
or lesser importance. When it was made easier to get by with
paying only half the bill, it was natural to assume that they
would stay longest at the Russian Club. My friends and I payed
our share of the drinks and got out. We were novices. We had
also been indoctrinated with the theory that the less said about
your official activities, the better. I found this practice of
supplying soldiers and sailors with subsidized alcohol was a
very widespread practice both in Manila and other parts of the
Philippines where Japan and her allies had an interest.
I, along with most of the boys who had come recently from
the States, was interested in seeing more of the Philippines
than Clark Air Base and Manila. The few short excursions we took
were mostly by train. The nearest train station was at Angeles,
a mile or so outside the air base gate. We would get a cab to
the station platform. There we found the hordes of small boys
begging, shining shoes, and peddling candy and cigarettes.
There, too, I found my first "baloot" peddler. A "baloot” is a
duck egg that has been kept at a constant temperature of about
90 degrees for several weeks. The inside has congealed into an
amorphous mass. The eggs are then colored and sold as a high
treat, highly prized by Filipino children. I will admit that it
might be a most nourishing delicacy for those accustomed to a
rice diet. The very thought of eating one of these colorful eggs
almost nauseated me. For a couple of pennies, though, we could

-37-
buy them on the station platforms and give them to the
youngsters. They gobbled greedily as we grimaced with something
less than pleasure. Even when I was starving, I still could not
afford to dwell on baloots. It was a delicacy that seemed to
have no place in my lexicon of things to eat.
Angeles, the little town on the edge of Clark Field, was an
amazing pattern of brothels, gin mills, dance halls and tailor
spots. The dance halls and brothels were, of course, mostly
adjacent. The medical department of the Army thought so little
of the cleanliness of those houses of ill repute, they stationed
medical corpsmen outside the entrance to hand out sulpha to all
those who partook of the favor of the ladies therein. These
public houses were, it is true, on the lower level in any
hierarchy of harlotry. The girls I saw were not attractive. They
were usually small statured Filipinos, their long black hair
hanging down their backs, their thick, satiated faces showing
neither pleasure nor disgust, just a bored indifference to all
the noise.
Harlotry is not as disgraceful an occupation in the Orient
as Americans like to pretend it is in the States. It is one way
a family can survive well in an economy where the cards are
stacked against a large majority. A farm family with an
attractive daughter will groom her to a life, short though it
may be, of such degradation. She, with her earnings, can enable
the boys of the family to attend school and the family will eat
well. It has never been considered an honored profession,
though, even in the lowest strata of society.
Sergeant Jay Tracer and I did find one dance hall in
Angeles where we spent a few very pleasant evenings. The girls
were young and attractive. They were all good dancers and they
were all chaperoned by their mothers. This whole arrangement was
somewhat different than I had ever seen.
We went up a stairway to a huge, second-story loft. The
front third of the area was arranged with tables. A few
Filipinos and Americans were sitting drinking the favorite
beverage, rum and Coke. The waiter brought us a bottle of rum
and two bottles of Coca-Cola. We mixed our own drinks, heavy or
light as we wished. The price was 25 cents gold. For years
before and after the war the ratio of Philippine currency to
American was 2-1; that is: Two pesos were equal to one dollar.
Money was interchangeable in any shop.
Where the plain tables and chairs ended in the loft, there
was a framing of light timbers covered with chicken wire. Behind
this flimsy barricade was the dance floor. Ranged along three
sides of the floor were bleacher-like seats. The girls sat in
these bleachers. Dance tickets were 10 centavos each. You bought
a ticket or roll of tickets and were passed through the gate.

-38-
You gave the girl you asked to dance a ticket and, as long as
you kept giving her tickets, you could dance. The music was
dished out in the rhythm of the day by a good band and the
pleasant atmosphere made it an enjoyable evening for both Tracer
and myself.
The girls lived in the back of the loft with their mothers.
There were no dates and no taking a girl into the back room. It
was a real attempt to run an orderly dance hall. It was a little
tame for many of the boys, as was evidenced by the light crowd.
One other place we visited was also upstairs, over a
woodcarving shop. It was the most attractive place in town. All
manner of carved figures, chests, bas-relief works and small
figures were tastefully arranged around the walls. The drinks
were good at the bar or at tables. It was the hangout for the
"Homesteaders" who had soldiered in the Philippines for some
time. We also found out later on that it was Japanese Espionage
Headquarters. Some of the old-timers had told me that when you
were known, you could get almost unlimited credit at the
woodshop.
Sergeant Tracer and I wanted to get tailor-made suits, and
did the rounds of the shops. The accepted suit material was a
heavy-weight sharkskin in pastel shades of blue, pink or just
plain white. The tailoring was well done and a complete outfit
made to measure was $15. The material was of differing quality
and we did not want to order till we had more experience in
judging the cloth. One balmy evening when Tracer and I went to
town, we felt we wanted to see something out in the countryside.
We hired a Calesa--a sort of one-horse shay--for the trip. A
Calesa is really a pony cart with two big wheels. The driver
sits, legs folded beneath him on the protruding rack just behind
the pony. The passengers sit behind him in moderate comfort.
There is a great deal of whistling, whipping and chatter as the
driver urges his pony to trot, not walk. These tough little
Manchurian ponies seem to be able to do a great deal of
trotting, but not without an equal amount of urging.
Our pony trotted between the dark outline of trees on
either side of the road, the clop-clop of his tiny hooves
echoing in our ears. It was a sparsely settled section. From
time to time, we would pass a bamboo shack, sitting high on its
stilts and lit by a long neon bulb in the main and only room. By
this time, I thought our driver was going to whip our poor pony
half to death, we came to a cluster of several buildings. This
was, the driver said, "Bam-Ben." I immediately liked the sound
of the name. I was heartily tired of seeing that poor pony
whipped and we paid the driver off, saying we would not be going
back. He was most solicitous and offered to wait. Tracer and I
both felt that we would rather walk home the 5 km than ride a

-39-
Calesa. We had hopes, too, of being able to call a cab from
Clark Field.
We headed for a lighted cafe on the second story of one of
the buildings. It was about the only light in the little
settlement. It was clean, gaily decorated and bright with
several fluorescent lights. This was, we soon found out, a
family operation. We were the only customers. How these small
roadside places existed at all was a mystery to me. At best it
must have been a marginal enterprise. Our host, his wife,
several small children and a teen-age daughter were all pressed
into service as though a well-mapped campaign was begun. After
an exaggerated greeting the host showed us to a table where he
made a great show of seating his American guests. He made a
motion to the family, standing goggle-eyed behind the counter,
and they began bringing napkins of clean cotton, a tablecloth,
silverware and salt and pepper. Only the little boys did
nothing. They just stared over the counter at us as though we
were men from Mars.
With such hospitality, we could do nothing less than order
sandwiches, which we did. Then we asked for rum and Coke, which
appeared quickly.
I suppose that one of these little wayside taverns could
blossom overnight into a very profitable business should it get
popular. At any rate, our hosts left nothing undone to make us
welcome. We ate our sandwiches, had a couple of rum and Cokes,
paid the bill and left.
Across the street was a dimly-lit structure that looked
more like a big California bungalow than anything else. Its
unpainted sides were nestled back in the trees and the music
that came from a juke box told us it was something of a night
spot.
We went in and found a large room filled with tables.
Perhaps half a dozen of them were occupied by airmen and
officers from the base. The room was drab and dingy, dimly-lit
and far less inviting than our first choice. We sat down and had
a drink. We drank our drink and were lucky enough to get a cab
from the base by phone for the trip home. The only pleasant
memories of the evening consisted in our seeing Bam-Ben, the
small family cafe, and being out of the hustle of the city and
the pressure of the base. The names Bam-Ben, Tarlac-Lubao have
always brought up nostalgic memories of those cool, tropical
nights, the silent jungle, the glimmer of moonlight, and the
trickle of running water as it coursed along the side of the
road. The tropics has a spell that is hard to escape.

The Philippine Archapelago
-40-
In November of 1941, I went with a Major Gibbs and his B18
Bomber crew on a reconnaissance flight to the Southern
Philippines. This was almost the only opportunity I had to see
and enjoy the spectacular sight of this great arching chain of
7500 Islands flung out over some 500 miles of placid tropical
sea.
At an altitude of some 7000 feet as we cruised Southerly
from Clark Field on the main Island of Luzon, I could see the
verdant green of clusters of small islands, the ridges and
forests of the larger ones and the panorama of spectacular
beauty unfolding before us. It was as though some great hand had
flung a handful of brilliant emeralds along a sunlit watery
corridor from Luzon on the North to Mindanao on the South. This
was an imaginary Maxfield Parish painting with its illusory
clouds, its vistas of green loveliness, its brilliant blues and
its seemingly endless romantic havens.
I knew little of the Islands and only watched in
fascination as we cruised through the beauty of that Tropical
morning.
It was obvious to me as we approached the largest Island of
them all, Mindanao, the Southern-most of the chain culminated in
the Southern-most town, Zamboanga. This was still the frontier
of an ancient civilization, the home of many of the Moros, the
Moslem sect that had been transplanted to the Philippines by the
Arabs in earlier days. Zamboanga was also on the Northerly edge
of the Sulu Sea and the Island of Sulu, where the great Datu of
all the Moros lived and ruled.
Mindanao, too, I had read about as the place where another
soldier, a Captain John J. Pershing, had fought and won a great
campaign against the Moro Insurectos around the turn of the
century.
As we began our run down the coast toward Zamboanga, I
suddenly began to smell the distinct odor of rotting fish. I
thought it might be something in the plane but the odor was much
too strong for that and it increased by the minute. When it
persisted, I went forward and asked the crew chief. He pointed
to the long, white beach far below, it was cluttered with
dwellings and wide piers that stretched out into the bays and
inlets.
“That," said the crew chief, "is the reason. Those are fish
drying piers. The Moros of this sect live out over the water and
dry their catch out in the open on those bamboo piers."
For miles these piers extended along the coast. What we
were getting was the odor of years of dried fish and some that
had failed to dry sufficiently.

-41-
The crew chief also told me that in some parts of this
great Island the natives fished by diving into the great schools
of fish with a special root in their mouths and a big rock in
each hand. As they centered in the school of small fish, they
crushed the root between the rocks. Its anesthetic action would
cause the fish to lose their ability to swim for a few moments
and they would rise to the surface where other natives in small
boats would scoop them up.
Mindanao was, as I have said, a huge island. It was,
according to men who had lived and worked there, about one-third
Pagan, one-third Moro and the remaining third Christian. Though
I was never actually in Zamboanga, about the largest town on the
island, I did hear that it boasted that it was bigger than Los
Angeles and had unexplored territory within the city limits.
Thus, we can turn once again to the end of 1941 and focus
our attention to the realities of Bataan and Prison camp.
New Years at Cabcabin - 1942
CHAPTER IV
BATAAN
This New Year's Eve showed little prospect of being a
hilarious occasion. Still, to celebrate the end of a most
eventful year, Larry Hamilton, Alf Crabtree and I set off just
after dark to explore. The little barrio of Cabcabin lay along
the beach adjacent to our bivouac. It consisted of a half dozen
bamboo shacks set high on stilts, a few fishing boats drawn up
on the beach and the ever present Filipino youngsters playing
along the banks dotted with pigs and chickens. There was a
small, soft drink stand, also built of bamboo, in the midst of
the shacks. It sold sweetened, colored water in bottles, the
Filipino equivalent of soda pop. The water of Manila Bay lapped
quietly at the soft mud of the beach. The clouds lined the dark
horizon of the sky. There were no lights. A few natives passed
to and fro in the ominous silence of the warm night.
A bit back from the shore, we did encounter a real bonanza:
a bake shop. The baker was just bringing off a batch of bread.
The loaves were about half a pound each. Just out of the oven,
they were warm, tasty and fragrant. We bought all he would sell
us.
The baker said, "I have only a little flour left. The
people need this bread." So we made a deal with him. We had 600
pounds of flour in camp. If he would make the bread, we would
furnish the flour and we would split the results. I hurried back
to camp and sold the idea to the mess sergeant. He had no big

-42-
ovens and the idea of having fresh bread for the whole out-fit
appealed to him, especially as the flour would get buggy were it
not used soon. One of the boys conned a gallon can of jam
somewhere (by moon-light requisition, I assume) and we had a
feast of fresh bread and peach jam. It was the last such treat
we were able to enjoy in three long years.
With the coming of the New Year, we were told a ship was
due to take us to Mindanao. We would take only a limited amount
of equipment, what guns we had and our personal belongings. We
were to be ready on a minute's notice.
One ship did get into the harbor, pick up remnants of the
19th Bombardment Group and carry them to the southernmost
island. They were bombed on the way but the Japanese were poor
marksmen and the bombs were short. These boys were later
captured at Del Monte, the southern island's air base.
Our ship was either sunk or damaged by the Japanese
blockade on its way into Manila Bay as were some 20 or more
other ships that tried to run the blockade. We stayed right
where we were for several weeks.
When the transportation bogged down the decision was made
to employ the bulk of the Air Corps troops as a flank guard on
the Manila Bay side of the Orion Line. I was detached to
supervise a shop at the Philippine Air Depot stationed at Bataan
Air Field 1. I was able to keep Sergeants Hamilton, Crabtree,
and several other boys. We moved, with our equipment, to the new
station about a mile farther north.
This air strip was merely a bare piece of land scraped off
the hog-back of one of the low hills. It could serve for
launching fighters and observation planes, not much else.
Our bivouac area and shops were in the canyon alongside the
hill.
As the move orders came down from Headquarters, I realized
I had brought along some of my civilian clothes and my fishing
gear. The fact that I had been in charge of the move allowed me
some leeway. The precious fishing rods I had collected over the
past 20 years were all stored in a specially made box I had
brought from March Field.
During our New Year's Eve sojourn through the barrio of
Cabcabin, I had talked at some length with a native fisherman. I
decided to go down and have another talk with him. His name, I
had found out, was Pedro Camillo. He lived with his family in a
small shack close to the edge of the Bay. I sought out Pedro
again and identified myself. I told him of my box of gear and
asked him if he would care for it till I was able to claim it
once again. I remember telling him, "We will clean this ruckus
up in a few months. I'll be back."

-43-
I drew up a formal, written agreement with Pedro. In it I
agreed to pay him five pesos on the spot and five pesos a month
as long as he kept the box in good condition. Pedro took the
paper to a friend "who knew about such matters" and soon came
back with assent. We both signed the agreement and I felt sure
he would try his best to accomplish his part of the bargain.
(Had I been able to carry out my part of the bargain, I
would have owed Pedro something like $1,200 by the time I next
got back to Cabcabin some 19 years later.)
When I went back to the Philippines in 1960, my wife, son
and I hired a car and drove to Bataan and to Cabcabin. I
inquired for a "Pedro Camillo." Natives directed me to their
house. A slim, friendly girl came outside, a baby on her hip.
Her first words were, "Lieutenant Montgomery." She was the small
child I had seen playing on the beach that dark night that Pedro
and I had made our bargain. She did remember me.
Married now and with children of her own, she had lived
through the hard war years of Japanese occupation and married
the son of a neighbor. Her brother, a sailor in the Philippine
Navy, was close by and she sent one of the curious children to
bring him. He was home on pass. She explained to me that her
father and mother had both died several years back. She and her
brother were the only ones left of the family.
As for the box of clothes and fishing gear, it had had to
be destroyed soon after the family took it. They had been forced
to move back into the hill country on the slopes of Mt. Samat
and the box was much too heavy to be moved readily. The only
surviving relic was a huge ring stuffed in at the last moment by
Sergeant Alf Crabtree. I told the girl to keep it as a memento
of her soldier friends.
We talked for an hour or so under the gently swaying
coconut trees close by the small nipa shack. The people of the
barrio gathered around while the children peeked out from behind
their mother's wide skirts in awe and wonderment. We were able
to give some presents to the children of Pedro's daughter and
left Bataan to continue our nostalgic visit of the places that
had made history. The trees, vines, and creepers had grown well
during the years and no traces of war and its depredations were
evident. At one place, though, I did find a small graveyard
where we had buried several Filipinos killed in one of our
skirmishes. Bataan 20 years afterward was once again a peaceful,
jungle-covered spit of land where the wild pigs and big snakes
vie for supremacy.

Bataan Air Field No. 1
-44-
Like most of our other locations, Bataan Air Field No. 1
was in a wooded area. The tall trees protected us from
observation. The under-growth of ferns, bushes, and leaves
provided a delightfully sylvan setting for a camp. There was a
small stream close by where we could bathe as often as time
would permit.
I reported my small group to Captain Mike Ushakoff and was
told to get bedded down and report for work. Our first big job
was to build machine gun mounts for the anti-aircraft defense
system of t h e field. The guns we had were twin 5 h air-cooled
machine guns from the wrecked B17s. They were very good guns,
but without the cold temperatures of the altitudes in which they
were designed to fire, they did get hot after a couple of
hundred rounds. Still, they could throw a tremendous amount of
lead.
This airstrip was always under close observation by the
Japanese. It is very difficult to hide an air strip. You might
be able to camouflage one but it's like covering up the
Washington Monument: even an untrained observer knows that
something is there. So day after dreary day, the dive bombers
came winging their way in from the north to make their run,
strafe and bomb the strip. The Japanese employed a technique we
had not seen before. Our dive bombers had always been trained to
approach the target ate safe altitude, wingover and dive
straight down for better sighting. The Japanese came in low,
jumped the field and dropped their bombs from about a 10 degree
glide path. I can't say whether they were easier or more
difficult targets. We did shoot down a few but, figuring the
number of bombings we took, our average was not high.
We usually slept well in our jungle bedroom. We tried to
get in a bath before the sun went down. The stream close by was
a refreshing and delightful change from the dust and sweat of
the day. The malaria-bearing mosquitos began their hungry hunt
as the sun set. To outwit them, we tucked into our blankets
lying on the ground and were careful to tuck the netting well
underneath. Even the trip up the hill for 50 feet from the
stream was a chore. Our legs were rubber, our bodies weary and
our minds fagged out. It would not have been hard to sleep
anywhere.
One morning I was awakened by the P40s warming up. The
early reconnaissance plane was being readied for a look around.
The steady drumming of the Allison engine throbbed through the
still morning air. The lull that signaled the end of the test
run came. Then, the plane began its takeoff down the uneven
strip toward the opening in the trees toward the Bay. In the

-45-
darkness all we could hear was that heavy throated roar of 1200
horsepower at full throttle. There was a break in the steady
syncopation as the engine missed fire. I held my breath and
breathed a prayer. There just was not enough runway to stop
forward progress. The pilot was past the point of no return. The
engine spit, coughed and roared again. It was too late. The
pilot had lost his air speed and the plane settled back to
earth. First there was the sound of a rending scrape of metal,
then a small bomb tore loose and exploded. I could almost follow
the course of the tragedy as the wheels sheared off and the
plane skidded along on its belly, bombs exploding as they tore
off the racks. Then it was quiet again. The sound of truck
engines rushing to rescue the pilot was reassuring.
We prayed and our prayers were answered. The pilot was not
badly hurt though the plane was a total loss. The bombs had been
only 25-pounders and only a few of them had exploded. Before
dawn the plane was off the runway and another plane sent off to
search for changes in the enemy position.
Our shops in the ravine below the strip were centered
around the big machine trailers. We used self-contained
generator systems for power, compressed air and a pumping
system. We employed the same system I had used earlier of having
an Air Raid Warden who clanged a gong just before the raid
began. The crews working in the field above had a warden, too.
He fired two shots from his pistol. At the alarm, there was a
hurried shutdown of machines, turning off of welding torches and
a mad scramble for the foxholes.
As I have said, our living quarters were lush and
beautiful, surrounded as we were by ferns and trees. We were
usually so completely bushed at the end of a day's work we
bathed and fell under the mosquito bar to sleep till morning. It
was not really until morning, though. Before daybreak, the
strident call of the First Sergeant would ring up and down the
small canyon. "Alright, boys, alright. Rise and shine." Then, he
would give a mighty blast on his whistle and we would come
tumbling out. After a quick wash, we went up the hill to the
kitchen for a cup of coffee. From there, we went to work. About
10 A.M. we would take a break for breakfast which, as we had
come to expect, consisted of rice with anything the cooks could
scrounge. It was a very meager diet and we were always half
starved.
We use these terms "half starved" and "hungry as a horse"
in a different sense than we used them then. We were really half
starved, having subsisted on less than 1,000 calories a day for
over a month. Just dragging back up that canyon for breakfast
was an ordeal after three hours of hard work. I well remember
just getting my mess kit filled with rice and my cup of coffee

-46-
brimming when the air raid sounded one morning. I scattered with
the rest being careful all the while not to spill a drop of
coffee or a grain of rice. That food was almost as important as
being alive. The bombs that morning exploded over 100 yards away
and we ate our breakfast right in the foxholes.
When the bombs damaged the runway, the big tractors were
out scraping the dirt back almost before the intruders were out
of sight. Next the graders would come in, level off the filled
area and the tampers finish off the job while the trucks brought
in more fill. The ground was solid and the raids did nothing
more than mess up the strip for an hour or so. All our flights
were reconnaissance. We did not have enough P40s to fight with.
Headquarters had ordered no offensive action in order to save
what observation we had from getting shot down. Still, from time
to time, the boys would jump a flight of Nips and engage them.
We were privy to some of those air battles and on the two
occasions where I was a witness, our fighters came off with
victories.
One afternoon, I was ordered to take a crew of men to
unload a small ship at the Bayside dock. We would work after
dark and finish when the ship was empty. The Japanese had been
trying to sink this inter-island boat and had been unsuccessful.
We were to unload the tools aboard so she could be utilized for
patrol work.
Sergeant Tony Holub drew the first shift for the work and
his men labored mightily until midnight. I had my boys on the
quay and we took over completion of the task.
The small ship lay silhouetted against the dark waters of
the Bay at the end of almost 100 yards of stone jetty, the water
lapping quietly at her hull. We knew that small, Japanese
gunboats were cruising offshore and silence as well as blackout
was a rule.
Walking that long 100 yards out to the ship the first time
I felt almost as though I were running naked down a busy street.
There was absolutely no protection from shell or rifle fire from
the Bay and I could almost feel the eyes of the Japanese
searchers pick me out.
We turned to with vigor. The bulk of the load was kits
piled full with hand tools. Each of these weighed close to 100
pounds. It was all a man could do to muscle one off the deck and
trundle it to the waiting cart. Several of the boys turned up
with hernias as a result of that night's work. In the early
quiet and hustle of those night hours, we raced with time to
finish the job before daylight.
Corregidor lay about four miles to our right. It looked low
and foreboding in the sky, and altogether deserted. From time to
time, a rocket would flare up from one of the bunkers on the

-47-
island, light up the sky and the surrounding water and fizzle
out to leave us in darkness again. With dawn approaching, a P40
roared its way off the airstrip in back of us and streaked off
toward the Bay channel seeking out a target. The trigger-happy
sentinels on Corregidor fired a blast of 50-caliber machine gun
bullets at it, the tracer bullets cutting a series of fiery
splotches in the dark sky. There was near panic at the sound of
shots but we soon got back to work again. Just as the day was
beginning to light up the sky, we finished and trooped off the
exposed jetty to the trucks waiting to take us to the bivouac.
We had been so used to seeking cover that the exposure of the
open jetty, even under cover of darkness, had been a great
strain.
Decision
After supper the evening of February 2, I was called up to
Head-quarters of our woodsy camp. Mike Ushakoff introduced me
and several other noncoms to an officer from Corregidor. H
He said, "You have been recommended for a commission. If
you accept, you will be transferred to the Infantry and go to
the front to lead Filipino troops."
The officer also told us we had an hour in which to make
our decision. This eventuality had been in prospect for some
time. I, for one, had thought it over very carefully. The
several of us went off by ourselves and talked. Now that the
decision had to be made, I knew it was the hardest one I would
ever make. It meant leaving the work I knew and loved for
another which I did not know, filled with dangers I could not
anticipate and would know little about, combating. I knew, too,
that Singapore had been captured, that our chances of being
relieved by additional planes were remote and that our gasoline
supply was down to almost nothing for the planes we had. I knew
that I had come into the military service to become a soldier
and that fighting was part of soldiering. Our usefulness as
airmen was about over. We were, I felt, obligated to do the next
best thing, fight wherever we would be of the greatest help. I
was all in favor of taking the commission and its hazards. In
the end, Swede Carlson, Dan Pruitt and I did accept and were
sworn in that same night.
The officers invited us to celebrate our promotion with a
little medicinal alcohol mixed with raspberry juice. Dan Pruitt
and I accepted a glass but Swede Carlson, a very heavy drinker
before the war, had sworn off the day the Japanese bombed us at
Clark Field. I was very proud of my decision but very reluctant
to accept the responsibilities it carried. I went to bed that
night a Second Lieutenant of Infantry without a uniform, bars,

-48-
or even a piece of paper in my possession to certify to the
fact. S till, I felt it was the right decision. I knew my wife
would have agreed with my reasoning. I know I would have had
difficulty living with myself ever afterward had I not accepted
the challenge, had I refused to face the dangers it implied.
Those dangers were all too apparent. As a matter of fact, of the
dozen or so who were commissioned that night, I know of only two
of us who survived. Both Swede Carlson and Dan Pruitt died soon
after capture by the Japanese and mostly as a result of the
diseases they picked up under the strains of the front lines. I
had the sad duty of helping to place the cross on Dan Pruitt's
grave at Camp 0' Donnell.
And so, I was an officer. Our orders were to pack our gear
and be ready to move out for a new assignment next morning. One
of the officers gave-me some gold bars which I placed proudly on
my flight cap. I had been a Master Sergeant and the dozen or so
uniforms I had were identified with this rank. The night before
going to the front, I spent cutting off those chevrons I had
worked so long to achieve. I was going into a new life, a
dangerous life. I hoped only that it would be a useful one and,
perchance, a long one. I knew next to nothing about firearms and
less about infantry tactics. I did know something about men and
what made them tick, though.
Introduction to the Infantry
CHAPTER V
THE BATTLE OF BATAAN
I awoke that first morning at Division Headquarters of the
41st Infantry (Philippine Army) with the sudden realization that
I was now an Infantry officer about to go into battle. It was
not at all a reassuring thought. I tried going over in my mind
just what attributes I had to offer this war of the jungle. I
did know a smattering of close order drill. I had also absorbed,
by observation of Infantry outfits on maneuvers, a hazy
impression that Infantry soldiers alternated by crawling around
in the dirt and mud and charging wildly at the enemy with fixed
bayonets. Inasmuch as there was hardly room in these jungles for
one man to traverse a path alone, I discounted my knowledge of
close order drill. The hills were too steep for much running
even without fixed bayonets. So, I concluded, with some despair,
that I would have to content myself with crawling through the
mud and dust. I concluded, with some finality, that I knew about
as much about an Infantry war as the well-known pig knows about
Sunday. I also firmly resolved to tell, or at least, intimate to

-49-
my senior officer, my complete lack of knowledge and my
willingness to learn. Having made this momentous decision, I sat
up on my shelter half, threw off the blanket that had covered me
and looked around.
We had arrived in the blackness of the night, with a guide
who apparently could see like an owl. I still don't know how we
got down that slippery, steep trail into the Catman River
Canyon. The rain that had made our passage even more hazardous
had cleared. Now the trees were dripping, green and abundant.
They formed a canopy overhead through which one could only catch
glimpses of the sunlight that was beginning to invade our world.
From the rocky ledge that had served as my bed, I could look
perhaps 200 yards up the Catman. It was a sylvan setting of rare
beauty. At the upper end, two streams joined to form the river,
still a smallish stream by most standards. The water gushed,
burbled, and bounded over the stony stream bed and passed around
a bend off to my right. It was, perhaps, 50 feet at its widest
point. There was a neat little bamboo bridge the engineers had
laid as a handy crossing. As dawn brightened the sky, the place
seemed to come to life. Voices chattered as Filipinos ran down
to wash and bring back water for breakfast. The dripping
coolness, the ethereal peacefulness of this gurgling brook had
no place in my lexicon of places to fight a war.
Yet here we were, a few hundred yards back of what was, for
all intents and purposes, the front lines. Division Headquarters
might not be winning but they had picked a lovely setting in
which to lose.
General Lim's Headquarters were on a slight rise of ground
off to my left. I could see the well-camouflaged bamboo huts
that blended into the hillside. Scattered along the banks of the
stream and farther back on the hills were Division Supply,
Engineering, Ordnance, and Artillery. With its communications
net, this was the nerve center, as the saying goes, for some
10,000 Filipino troops, manning about 5,000 yards of the front
line or, I was soon to learn, "The Main Line of Resistance."
As Swede Carlson and Dan Pruitt, who were on either side of
me, began to stir, we exchanged greetings, picked up our gear
and went down to the river to wash. By the time we had picked
up, a messenger was on hand to relay Colonel Fortier's greetings
and invite us to breakfast. We were all well ready.
Colonel Fortier, it should be explained, was the senior
advisor to General Lim and his division. We were being brought
up to act as junior advisors.
As we threaded our way across the stream to greet Colonel
Fortier, I ruminated that while I might have a working knowledge
of what makes an airplane tick and even what to do when it needs

-50-
fixing, I was a most inadequate person to be advising in matters
of such vital concern as killing people.
My spirits picked up considerably when I saw that there
were piles of pancakes and even a bottle of syrup. We had not
had such elegant food for weeks. Some jam appeared and even a
spoonful of sugar for the coffee. War need not be such a
dreadful thing after all, I told myself. I even mentioned it to
Swede and he agreed between mouthfuls of pancakes.
When we were not quite full, Colonel Fortier sent his
adjutant over to summon us to a conference. Colonel Fortier
explained that we were welcome. He greeted each of us warmly and
said he hoped we were the first of the thousands we all hoped
were on the way. These amenities, we felt, were courteous but
bordering on the fantastic. We were half a dozen Air Corps
soldiers with little or no experience and hardly a shred of
infantry training. I, for one, had never even had an army rifle
in my hands. My only acquaintance with firearms at all was those
brief periods each year when we qualified on the pistol range. I
had a fairly steady hand and I could listen to instructions.
After my first year, I could make "Expert" as far as hitting a
target was concerned. Swede and Pruitt were not much better.
Swede was an aircraft mechanic and Pruitt was a parachute
rigger.
Of the other boys in the small group, the only one I had
any contact with was "Doc" Hinton. He was a big, beefy boy who
had gotten his nickname because he had been a medical student
before being drafted.
Colonel Fortier, who was a tall, lean, regular Army
officer, told us we would be parceled out to various groups of
the 41st Division. He said he needed four men for the 54th
Regiment, two for the 52nd, and one for the 41st. As the others
paired off, I elected to take the single stint with the 41st
Regiment. I don't know by what quirk of circumstance I made the
choice but, as it turned out, I was the only one to survive.
With one of the headquarters orderlies as a guide, I set
off down a trail alongside the stream for the command post of
the regiment. I had brought along a big bag of extra clothing,
knowing that wearing apparel would be scarce. As it turned out,
my new American companions were far more interested in the
clothes than they were in me.
I was to report to Major John Martin, and after half an
hour's walk, we reached the area. The Commanding Officer of the
41st was a major of the Philippine Army. He and his staff had a
well-groomed bivouac area alongside the stream. The ground was
neatly swept and well-made bamboo lean-tos served as sleeping
tents. Most of the personnel of the Regiment were from Batangas
Province, south of Manila. From the stories the men later told

-51-
me of their homeland, it must have been a quietly lovely place.
They called it the "fruit bowl" of the Philippines. Groves of
all types of tropical fruits were harvested in Batangas. There,
too, in the jungle density the mosquitoes could thrive. Most of
the men of the 41st had recurrent malaria.
My guide took me across the path from the Filipino C. P. to
a smaller and less neatly policed area where several American
officers were just eating breakfast. They, too, had pancakes and
coffee.
I reported to Major Martin, a rather heavyset, jowly sort
of man who, it seems, never took off his tin hat even when he
lay down to sleep. He did rise, his mess kit in one hand and,
with the other, gave my hand a shake. With a perfunctory wave he
introduced the other officers who had risen to say “hello".
Then, sitting on his log once again, he drawled in his very
obvious Southern accent, "Don't have much, son, but if you
haven't had breakfast, we can share."
I assured him I had eaten, even though I was hungry enough
to eat a dead dog with a sore leg, and set about getting my gear
in a pile. I disengaged my canteen cup and went over to have a
cup of coffee with my new comrades. Besides Martin, there were
Captain Sparks, Captain Davey, and Lieutenant Weiss. A Filipino
orderly also was a part of the group.
Major Martin was not an overwhelming conversationalist and
his questions came between mouthfuls of pancakes. He seemed
kindly enough and when he had asked the usual questions about
experience and "How things going back in the rear area?" he let
me answer some of the questions put by Captains Davey and
Sparks. These two were obviously interested in the big bag I had
brought along. Sparks had lost most of his clothing in a
withdrawal not long before and was delighted when I said I had
brought along half a dozen outfits of khaki. I even had a new
leather flight jacket I had scrounged from the clothing stores
of the Philippine Air Depot before I left. With clean, new
uniforms, everyone was immediately in a much better frame of
mind.
These officers had been involved for the past two months in
the delaying action that had slowed down the Japanese advance.
It was a series of actions pitting green Filipino troops against
well-trained Japanese soldiers driving down from their landing
in Lingayen Gulf toward Manila. The actions could be called
successful to the extent that they provided time to prepare
defense positions on Bataan. They merely slowed down the
Japanese advance, though. Japanese plans had called for control
of the Philippines in 30 days. With 60 days gone, they had run
out of man power and much of their punch. While they did control
Manila, they did not control the valuable prize, Manila Bay, as

-52-
a base for future operation. True, they had bottled up some
50,000 Philippine and American Army units on Bataan and
Corregidor. Until these were defeated, though, their lines of
communication, a supply for further progress, was halted.
Here, too, it might be well to have a look at the overall
strategy. For many years, the Orange Plan had been a basic
concept of Philippine defense. The Orange Plan was developed
before the days of air power. It envisioned a strong defense of
Bataan Peninsula, thus protecting the back door to Corregidor.
With "The Rock's" big guns protecting it from the sea approaches
and Bataan protecting it from the rear, an enemy could not use
this magnificent harbor as a base.
Food lockers, refrigerated bunkers and well-developed
trails were built up over the years as defense units maneuvered
on Bataan. The Orange Plan became so well-known that even the
Japanese laid plans to thwart its purpose. Secret caches of
Japanese arms were found buried on the peninsula. They had been
boated in and buried against the day when small parties of
troops would land and create havoc behind the Philippine lines.
When General Douglas MacArthur was called in by President
Quezon to reorganize the Philippine Army, he abandoned the
Orange Plan. "The Filipino," he said, "would fight the enemy on
the beaches." While this may have been patently impossible, the
strategy was sound.
When war did break out in December of 1941, Bataan was not
equipped to support an army. The food lockers were empty. Though
some of the roads were still usable, the only entrance and
egress from Bataan was a single, narrow road through open
country. Even so, when the Japanese landed in force the decision
was made to withdraw into the peninsula. This was the 72 hours
that "will decide the fate of the Philippines." Had the Japanese
been expecting an army of 50,000 men to expose themselves along
that single, narrow and open road, they could have easily cut
that army to pieces. As it was, the army did get into Bataan
before the Japanese realized what had happened. True, they had
relatively little food, poor equipment and hardly any aircraft.
On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, it was something of a
Pyrrhic victory, for the Japanese had shot their wad, lost
thousands of men and come to a standstill.
A strong Philippine main line was set up across the
narrowest part of the peninsula along the Pilar-Bagac Road. This
was a canyon running from Subic Bay to Manila Bay, surmounted on
each side by low hills and separated by a small river. The
precipitous wooded, 4,000-foot hills of Mount Samat and the
Marevelis Range afforded shelter for the defenders.
The 4lst Division had been engaged in this delaying action.
They had made a stand at Abucay Junction and taken a beating.

-53-
They had not lost as many men as the Japanese who had thrown
thousands of men in frontal assaults against the well-prepared
positions, but they had been cut up badly.
By the time I arrived at the front, a lull had set in. The
Japanese were waiting for reinforcements and we were
consolidating our positions. We held the high ground, had plenty
of 6-inch guns in good positions, adequate rifle ammunition,
thousands of very weary men and very scanty rations. When an
army moves, guns and ammunition are the first consideration.
Without cold lockers, the millions of pounds of fresh beef in
Manila had been abandoned. Only canned food and rice were
brought along. An army of 55,000 men eats a lot each day, even
on less than half ration.
So here we were, in the middle of a sort of cross between a
jungle and a forest, our backs to the sea and the prospect of a
fresh army moving in against us. Japanese aircraft controlled
the skies and their warships patrolled the routes any supply
ships would have to take. They did, as a matter of fact, sink
some 26 out of 28 small supply ships bringing food in to us.
One small ship with several hundred airmen did get out to
Mindanao, a southern island, where they manned a group of B17s
attacking the Japanese fleet. These were later flown to Java and
still later to Australia. Those of us who were left were sent up
to fight as infantrymen.
In my new capacity as Junior Advisor to the Philippine
Army, I was only one of many trying to fill a space that might
or might not do some good. Whether we wanted to fight or not we
were going to fight. And as Captain Sparks said, "We hired out
to fight." This man, Russell Sparks, I immediately liked.
After breakfast, I asked Major Martin to brief me on the
possibilities, the situation and my duties. It did not take long
for me to become convinced that the Major was a beaten man.
Major Martin had come to the Philippines as a reserve
officer not six months before the war. What is more, he had come
directly from a more-or-less sedentary life as a lawyer and
school teacher in rural Dothan, Alabama. He was a self-educated
man, a kindly man, a somewhat bookish soldier. The rigors of the
previous two months of fighting had left him bone weary. The
ferocity of the Japanese assaults, the terrible artillery
poundings, and the unaccustomed hardships had used up most of
his reserve. John Martin seldom took off his clothes when he
slept. Too, he slept in a foxhole while the rest of us stretched
out in the open. John's analytical mind had researched the
possibilities, probabilities and alternatives of our position
and faced up to the fact that we were just what we were, a
sacrifice force. The rest of us had not come face to face with
that stern reality as yet.

-54-
As Russell Sparks joined the Major and me in our talk about
the situation, he and the Major branched off to a consideration
of the day's activities. Sparks was in charge of the outpost
line. This was a sketchy series of foxholes--machine gun
emplacements manned by Filipino soldiers flung out some 1,000
yards in front of the mainline of resistance. Its purpose was to
patrol the area in front of our lines, intercept enemy patrols
and, in the event of attack, warn the mainline before
withdrawing.
The Filipino soldiers were under the direct command of
Filipino officers. Our role was to advise, consult, and as
needed, to direct operations.
Our reconnaissance patrols were all run during the day. The
Japanese, on the other hand, did most of their patrolling by
night. The Japanese used all sorts of devices to confuse and
bewilder the poorly trained Filipinos. Working as they did in
the darkness, they would slip past our sentries, tying small
bits of white cloth on bushes to guide them back as daylight
broke. They would, on occasion, set off firecrackers with a
delayed fuse to draw attention to a spot they had long since
passed. They would climb trees and spend 24 hours perched in
leafy obscurity on the chance of getting a shot at an American
officer. As was our practice, they would be looking for
information on movements, not a fight.
Headquarters had been concerned about the fact that the
outpost line had been withdrawn by its Filipino officers on
several occasions and had been forced to fight its way back the
next day. We, as advisors, had been ordered to stay on the
outpost at all times and forestall this withdrawal. As I
listened to the two officers talk, I felt that if I was going to
learn to be an infantryman, I had better begin. I asked to be
assigned to Captain Sparks. A nod from Major Martin told me he
had the same idea in mind.
The front Lines
Right after noon, Captain Sparks and I filled our mess kits
with rice and started out. I was to be introduced to war.
"About the only consolation there is to being on the
outpost line," said Sparks, "is that everyone out in front of
you is an enemy. If you hear a noise out there at night, you
shoot first and then ask questions."
The trail we took led down the stream to a broad and welldevastated
sugar cane field. We branched off to the left and
crossed the Pilar-Bagac Road. As we approached the undergrowth
on the other side of that road, Sparks took out his pistol,
checked the ammunition clip, pulled the hammer back and set it

-55-
on safety. Without being told, I did the same. We walked
quietly, pistols in hand along the narrow trail. As we came to
the shallow river that separated us from a low ridge of hills,
we watched cautiously for ten minutes for signs of any movement.
Then Sparks, motioning me to follow, stepped out into the open
and began picking his way among the rocks to the water's edge
and on across the shallow water course. The unsure footing, the
eerie solitude, the unfamiliar surroundings and the tension made
the perspiration flow off my back and down my trouser legs. My
shirt was stuck to my back. My metal hat was uncomfortable, the
sweat trickling down my face from around the plastic headpiece.
I did not take my eyes off that far line of trees, though, and
stumbled more than once as my feet fumbled among the rocks for a
foothold.
We made the far shore and scrambled up the bank to the
protection of the undergrowth where Sparks stopped again to get
his bearings. He, too, was sweating profusely from the exertion
of the river crossing. He smiled at me and motioned for us to
proceed.
This was the dry season on Bataan and the brush, taller
than a man's head, was brittle and scratchy as we passed
through. I marveled at Sparks' uncanny sense of direction. Soon
we could sight the slight rise in ground where the first of the
outpost sentries was stationed. Sparks announced our coming with
a low whistle.
Sparks told me that this was the westerly anchor of our
outpost line. We would, he said, make a tour of the whole system
as a beginning. I suppose I had half expected to find men
crouching in foxholes, rifles at the ready and machine guns
poised for action. The line extended for over a mile along the
crest of a hill, down into a small canyon and up the slope of
another rise. Instead of the tension and alertness I
anticipated, we found Filipinos pounding rice, sleeping
stretched out in the open and under bushes, singing and
chattering as only Filipinos can. Some were squatting on their
haunches as only a native can squat, tending small fires and
stirring rice that cooked in small pots over the flame. For the
most part, their rifles were leaning up against the nearby
bushes or alongside them in the dirt. Instead of uniforms, these
men wore a magnificent assortment of ragged trousers, torn
shirts and wornout shoes. The supply situation, it was obvious,
was something less than adequate. The Filipinos were apparently
a very happy lot, though. They greeted us warmly as we traversed
the line from group to group. The idea of the outpost was to set
up strong points about every 100 yards. The men were under
direct control of noncommissioned officers with instructions to
dig deep, small foxholes in which they could stand and fire

-56-
their rifles. Instead, though, we found that most of the holes
were dug in long, shallow fashion to make sleeping more
comfortable. A small hole in which a man can crouch makes a much
less vulnerable target for the enemy. The long, shallow holes
can be seen more easily from the air and present a much more
inviting target for snipers. We left instructions that the men
were to sleep as much as possible during the day and stand guard
at night. The noncommissioned officers would listen to our
instructions, nod somewhat understandingly and smile
appreciatively. In all my time on the out-post line, though, I
never knew of any changes in the type of foxholes or of any
great attempt to stand formal guard at night. We found, too,
that the Filipinos had set up crude automated alarm systems.
They had stretched string from bush to bush and tied cans there
full of small pebbles. Anything that shook those bushes would
shake the cans, sound the alarm and alert the guards. It was
probably better than a less than awake sentry.
There were areas in the line where the undergrowth was
thick. We left orders that it was to be cut back to allow a
field of fire. In subsequent days, we repeated the orders. As
far as I could determine, no attempt was ever made to comply
with the order. Each time we called the corporal's attention to
the oversight, he would grin, say that he would have it done
"only this afternoon, sir" and go on to his complaints about the
poor rations.
There was always sporadic rifle fire while we inspected the
OPLR (Outpost Line of Resistance). Most of it, as I grew to
learn, was Filipino soldiers hunting the wild chickens that
abounded in the underbrush. It was, perhaps, the best sort of
rifle practice and it would also confuse the Japanese. We gave
up trying to control that, too.
On more than one occasion, I had Filipino sergeants tell me
they had had nothing to eat for a week but a thin, watery soup
of rice. Their faces, even as they talked to me, were streaked
with cane molasses they had neglected to wipe off after their
last meal. There was usually the unmistakable and very savory
aroma of cooked meat around the campfire along the line, too.
The boys did not live expansively, but their foraging was not
unproductive. There was a sugar refinery in Balanga, about a
mile in back of the Japanese lines and each day someone made the
trip. We had given strict orders that no such foraging should
take place, but we were powerless to stop it. We would have
liked to question the men about conditions they found on these
forays, but no amount of interrogation could make them admit
they had disobeyed orders. Finally, I passed the word that trips
to Balanga were permitted if the boys would bring back
information. I think the supply of sugar increased but the

-57-
information did not. We had to depend on our official patrols to
bring that in. We also learned to discount half of what they
told us.
The night stints on the outpost were, by far, the worst.
Sparks and I had cleared off a small area under a tree a few
yards in back of the outpost line. A scout had brought us a
blanket with our evening rice. That first night on the OP is
still a vivid memory. Sparks and I took turns catnapping. We
made periodic forays up and down the line, stumbling through the
dark, hoping some trigger-happy Filipino would not shoot first
and ask questions afterward. After the shrill din of the locusts
and bird life of the daylight hours and the sharp barking noise
of the gecko lizards, the night was still, calm, warm and
portentous with silence. From time to time, the boom of a big
gun to our right or left told us someone had found a target.
Also, there was a sporadic crackle of small arms fire in the
more heavily wooded sector to our left. It was always easy to
distinguish the sharp crack of the Japanese 25mm rifle from the
heavier and duller "splat" of the 30mm used by our troops.
Sparks and I talked in low tones of our homes, our families
and our past. He was a young fellow not long out of New Mexico
A&M in Las Cruces, where he lived. His dad was a cotton farmer.
He had two sisters whose husbands were also cotton farmers. His
pleasant, friendly, well-disciplined personality was a healthy
antidote for the tensions of the night and, as a matter of fact,
for many a night thereafter. Sparks was a great source of
strength. Sparks had one of the cleanest, most interesting minds
it had been my good fortune to come in contact with. His good
humor and ready smile helped us over many a rough situation.
As that first night wore on there were stirrings up and
down the line. Runners came in with reports of Japanese activity
and either Sparks or I would go out to investigate. We could
discern nothing but some activity of small rodents or a
disturbed wild chicken. Then, about 2 A.M., a runner came
creeping up to our bivouac with the news that the Japanese had
us surrounded. We had heard the sound of rifle fire a short time
before. We knew that snipers were on the move and had stayed
quiet. Now, though, the runner said his noncommissioned officer
had told him we were about to be attacked in force. Sparks
crawled over to where the noncom lay and surveyed the situation
with him. He was gone a long time and I lay perfectly still, my
gun at the ready. When Sparks came back, he was smiling. He
whispered to me that the noncoms had all been a little jumpy and
wanted to pull back to the mainline.
“We may have a sniper or two in back of us," he said, "but
we are not surrounded. I told the boys to just stay awake and
stay put." This was the real reason we were on the OP. Had we

-58-
not been there, the whole 100 men would have withdrawn and left
the front unprotected. True, they would have been ordered back
in the morning, but would probably have taken casualties in the
process. By staying firm, we got through the night without
further incident.
Some nights were not so easy, though. A reinforced Japanese
patrol came through one night. They were obviously sent out to
test our strength. They were close before we could spot them.
Our machine guns and rifles opened up. There must have been 30
well-trained Nips in that patrol and they were determined to
silence that machine gun. In a sort of skirmish line they
charged the gun, walking doggedly into its lethal fire. As one
after another of them was dropped, another took his place.
Before they withdrew, they had lost some twelve killed and
several others wounded. They got their wounded away with them.
In another ten minutes, the machine gun would have blown up from
the heat of firing. The Filipinos could never quite appreciate
the limitations of a piece of machinery. Instead of firing in
short bursts and allowing the gun to cool in between, they would
depress the trigger and hold until they had run through a belt
or got a jam. This quirk the Japanese knew well and that is why
they kept coming. We had more than one gun captured that way.
Those Japanese were brave and even foolhardy men. Their
discipline was iron clad and their physical condition was good.
We buried many Japs on that outpost line and took many trophies.
The sergeants carried swords, some beautifully made. The rifles,
pistols, and automatic weapons were poorly made by our standards
but seemingly efficient. The 25 caliber bore of most of their
hand guns coupled with the long barrels gave the Japanese rifles
a high muzzle velocity. The average Japanese soldier, though,
was not a good shot. It was a different story with the snipers.
With their small caliber and big powder charge to give it punch,
the snipers and their telescopic sights could pick off an enemy
at several hundred yards with ease. Our patrols learned to be
very cagey in spotting and checking isolated trees, skirting
clearings and crossing any open ground.
On one occasion, headquarters set up and trained a special
squad for deep reconnaissance. They were equipped with M1
rifles, tin hats and good clothing. Their first sortie was to
escort a military photographer for pictures. Within 200 yards of
our OP they were cut to pieces by snipers, losing their
photographer and several members of the patrol. Headquarters
finally went back to our less skillful but more reliable
Filipinos with their torn trousers, bare feet and unorthodox
methods. We did the daily patrolling that kept the terrain some
half mile out in front of the lines pretty well spotted. When
Headquarters wanted to test Japanese strength with a combat

-59-
patrol, they sent out a special group. When one of these groups
would find something interesting such as an ammunition dump,
food storage or the beginnings of a gun emplacement, they would
send a runner back for artillery. Bataan had been thoroughly
scouted for many years and our coordinance maps gave us a pinpoint
accuracy. Our 6-inch guns could open up on a clump of
bamboo an acre in extent and mow it down like chaff before a
sickle. These guns were old, WWI relics and had wooden wheels
and steel tires but their accuracy was still good and they could
throw a deadly projectile something like ten miles. What is
more, we had plenty of ammunition. The guns were located on the
sides of Mount Samat, the forest giving them a high degree of
cover. There were, as I recall, some 75 of these 6-inch guns
along the 12 km of the line. When we called for fire, either by
runner bearing a map with the coordinance or by telephone, we
could hear the heavy, 90-pound slugs whistle overhead. If the
target was really inviting, we would call for four shots to the
right, four to the left, four long and four short. Then with the
surrounding bamboo and brush cut down the gun would be directed
to lay four right on dead center. With each shell having a
bursting radius of some 30 yards, the whole area would be
cleared of brush and enemy, but good.
It was these GPFs given to the Philippine Army after WWI
that held the Japanese at arm's length for those several months
of the Bataan campaign.
Our 3-inch mountain guns were much more mobile and could be
used readily and efficiently, too. They just did not pack the
punch or have the range of the 6-inchers, though.
As the days wore on our routine on the OP became very
wearing. Sparks and I would spend the nights together patrolling
the line, trying to get in a little rest, organizing security
patrols and looking for something to eat. After our morning
inspection of the line, one of us would return to the regimental
command post in the rear area. During the morning, he could
bathe in the river, wash clothes, and relax. Then, in the early
afternoon, with the evening rice in a small bucket, he would
retrace his steps back to the OP. It meant over 40 hours out of
each 48 on duty. On the following day, it would be the other
man's turn to go in for a bath.
On this sort of duty one sleeps whenever there is no
pressing problem at hand. If you have 15 minutes free, you lie
down, close your eyes, and are asleep. It does not matter
whether someone is shelling you or some other outfit is having a
scrap with a Japanese patrol off to your left. That is their
business. If you get the chance to sleep, you sleep. I can well
remember the time when the 22nd Infantry was fending off an
attack by a well-muscled Japanese patrol some 100 yards to our

-60-
left. They were going at the business hammer and tongs. From
time to time, we could see men running, firing and maneuvering
for a better position. All this time, our boys, some chewing
sugar cane, were stolidly pounding rice for their evening meal.
They had no more interest in a fight outside their sector than
the 22nd would have had for a fight that did not threaten them.
Our only concern was that the 22nd would muster enough strength
to push the Japs into our sector. Toward that eventuality we set
up a perimeter guard. Our code of ethics called for pushing the
Japs back toward their own lines not to the flank into another
outfit's sector. This rule, while not always honored, did work
pretty well.
Then one dark night the Japanese decided to test our
ability with shellfire. It was a walking barrage with 3-inch
guns. Sparks and I were sitting on the ground, our backs to a
tree. The warm tropical night had settled around us. The silence
was almost ominous. Then came the boom of a distant gun and
within seconds the whistle of a shell passing over.
"This," said Sparks, "sounds like the beginning of a busy
evening."
After that first sighting shot, the guns began to
methodically traverse our area. First a little long and then a
bit to the right, then working over to the left.
We knew that as long as the barrage continued the Japanese
patrols would not be bothering us. Only when the booming stopped
and the sharp tearing explosions ceased would we have to become
alert again. Sparks motioned for me to follow and he crawled off
100 yards or so into the bushes. He located an opening in the
ground and half crawled and half slid into a big underground
cavern. It was dark as the inside of your hat, damp smelling and
filled with a mustiness of stale rice. It was also somewhat
pleasantly cool. Sparks explained to me he had found the hole on
one of his scouting trips. The Filipino soldiers had told him it
had served as home for a large family of Filipino civilians as
they fled from the Japanese a few weeks before. There were
merchants and had brought the contents of their general store in
Balanga with them--bolts of cloth, food, clothing and everything
they might need to survive a long stay. They had also brought
the ever present dogs, as well as goats, with their women and
children.
During the several hours of the shelling, Sparks and I
remained in the big, underground shelter. He told me about his
home and his family in Las Cruces, about his job as a postal
clerk and his dreams of the future. I talked of my days and
years as an Army Air Corps noncom, the flights we had taken and
the wonderful wife I hoped to go back to.

-61-
From time to time during our sojourn in the hole, I could
feel what I thought was sand falling from the roof of the cave,
little pricks as though something was jumping or bouncing off my
arms and face. I gave it no more than a passing thought.
When the shelling subsided, we came out and traversed the
line very slowly and carefully. The men were jittery though
there had been no casualties. A shell has to come very close to
injure a man in a foxhole. On several occasions, I have had
shells burst within 20 feet as I lay protected only by a slight
hump of ground. The bursting of such a shell is upward. The
trees in the immediate vicinity were all scarred about three
feet above the ground. The nose of the shell, digging a few
inches into the ground before the detonator explodes seems to
throw its deadly load of fragments upward in a wide circle. Just
getting flat on the ground was 90% effective protection.
I had not been out of the hole long before I began to itch.
It was dark, though, and I could not tell what was biting me. I
spent the rest of the night slapping, scratching, rubbing,
wiggling and otherwise doing my best to divest my anguished body
of something that was feeding with an obvious delight on my
already emaciated frame.
Sparks did not seem to have been bothered at all. As
daylight crept slowly out of the eastern sky, my suspicions were
confirmed: fleas. It seems I had collected them by the hundred.
For some reason, fleas always did like my tender freckled hide.
The area around where my shirt tucked into my trousers was a
solid mass of welts. My chest and shoulders were covered with
flea bites. I had fleas all over me. The first approach I made
to divest myself of my uninvited guests was to strip off my
shirt and pants and shake them, but good. Then, methodically
going over every seam and strand of cloth, I pinched, slapped
and pursued as many of the lively and now well-fed little
rascals as I could find.
It was Sparks' day to go to the rear area for a bath and a
rest, so I was stuck with the duty and my fleas for another 24
hours. There was only enough water for drinking and a short
supply of that.
Had I asked, Sparks would have allowed me time to go back
to the stream half a mile away and bathe. I did not ask. I knew
how long he had been looking forward to his day of relaxation
and he should get it all.
The next 24 hours was probably the most miserable I spent
in what I consider the most trying five years of my life. By the
time I did get back to the command post the following day, I
was a mass of red welts. I had not gotten all the fleas. Those
that were left just had a little wider field for eating. The
sweaty, chafing shirt and pants had aided my scratching to break

-62-
the skin in a hundred places. I twitched, jumped, squirmed and
wiggled in agony. I made a hundred trips up and down that
outpost line just to keep my mind as occupied as possible. The
Filipinos were sure I had news of a strong counterattack by the
Japs and even became jumpy.
Finally, it was my turn to take a few hours off. I almost
ran the two miles back to camp. Without so much as a salutation,
I threw off my gun belt, stripped off my clothes and, grabbing
my last piece of soap, headed for the stream. I laid all my
clothes, including my shoes in a deepish hole and placed a big
rock on top of them. I then lathered myself from top to bottom
with the coconut oil soap in that deliciously cool, clean water.
Even the mild soap burned the raw welts but its burning seemed
to bring relief. I sat down in the stream. I splashed in it. I
washed my hair and even forgot there was a war. As I stood close
by the bank and rinsed out my uniform, one of the Filipino boys
came over to talk. I told him my story. He said he would ask the
doctor for something to ease the red welts that covered me. I
thanked him and went on washing. In a few minutes, he came back
with the Filipino doctor.
"Ah," said the doctor, "I have something for your relief."
He produced a small bottle of purplish stuff and told me to
"Just daub it on," and he handed me some cotton.
I began on the raw, red band of oozing welts around my
waist band. The fleas, it seemed, had worked their way down that
far and, momentarily impeded by the tightness of my trousers,
had munched furiously at my tender belly before going farther.
The first daub of that so-called ointment was as though I had
been branded with a hot iron.
"It will burn a little at first," the doctor philosophized.
I switched to a somewhat less tender area on my legs and
only went back to the belt line with small daubs from time to
time. Finally, I decided to smell the stuff the doctor had given
me. It had the unmistakable odor of iodine. As I squirmed and
wiggled and rubbed the now bleeding sores, I thanked the doctor,
picked up my wet clothes and shoes and picked my way over the
rocks back to my camp shelter. After hanging the clothes on some
bushes to dry in the sun, I got out a clean pair of shorts and
lay down. I was due, I knew, for at least another day of misery.
That iodine was already burning like crazy. Finally, I went down
to the river again and just lay in its cooling flow. My whole
body was almost too sore to touch by this time. By noon, Major
Martin told me I had better come in and get a bite to eat.
It was almost a week before I got over my experience with
the fleas and no amount of shelling could have forced me into
another underground cavern. I preferred death in the open to a
slow, painful, agonizing bout with insects.

-63-
It was about this time, too, that Sparks and I were on a
scouting mission and ran across a colony of army ants on the
move. I had heard of the depredations of these big, black ants.
I was fascinated. They were crossing our trail in a glistening,
black column perhaps six inches wide. On each side of the trail
the line extended as far as we could see, winding over fallen
logs, up trees and down again, around bushes and always moving.
These ants, I had been told, would eat anything they came
across, be it man or animal. There were so many of them and
their progress so inevitable that flight was the only escape.
There were millions of the quarter-inch long creatures and they
seemed to have a purposeful intensity about their movement. We
watched them for a few minutes, jumped over the line, and went
about our business.
We were on the outpost for several weeks before we had
orders to bring the boys back to a reserve area. They were as
happy as were we about the change. As it turned out, though, our
rest was a brief one. We were simply moved to a new locality and
assigned to the outpost of a new sector. Sparks had developed
phlebitis and was having trouble walking. Major Martin decided
to send him back to the base hospital for treatment. I took over
the new OP.
A New Command Post
We moved our command post to the top of a small hill. Major
Martin chose a spot under a large and lovely old tree. Our boy
built us a king-size sleeping platform of bamboo. We dug a
goodly shelter around and under the almost exposed roots of the
tree. Our field equipment consisted of a musset bag with
personal gear, a few pots and pans for cooking and a blanket and
shelter half as well as that most indispensable luxury, a
mosquito net.
The most dramatic sight that impressed itself on my mind as
Sparks and I made our first reconnaissance of the new positions
was a flat field of some ten acres in area. It lay on the
extreme left flank adjoining the sector of the Philippine
Constabulary. This field had been mined by our engineers and was
posted with small flags around its perimeter: dangerous and
forbidden territory.
Out half way in the middle of the mined field lay the body,
well-decomposed, of a dead Filipino. A little farther on was the
stinking carcass of a Carabao, also killed by an exploding mine.
No one had the pattern of the field and no one dared go in and
bury the bodies.
This field had been ordered mined by Division sometime
before we had taken over the sector. The Philippine Constabulary

-64-
did not maintain an outpost line and Japanese patrols filtered
right up to their main line of resistance. The Constabulary
soldiers would muster a sufficient fighting force and shove the
Japs over into our sector, turn around and go back to their
positions and leave us to fight off the marauding Japanese. The
mine field protected our flank from the inroads. Japanese
patrols soon learned about the mine field and retired rather
than plough into its deadly range. The dead Filipino had
wandered into the field one night and the Carabao, coming from
out of nowhere one evening, had done the same. We thoroughly
respected that mine field and gave thanks to its protection.
Sparks and I had, by this time, established a close
relationship. Before he was sent to the hospital, we had a
couple of nights together at the new location. He scrounged a
rifle for me. It was a World War I Enfield. This somewhat
antiquated, bolt-action piece served most of the Philippine
Army. There were even some older models, for instance, the Krag.
With the help of one of the boys, I set about learning how to
dismantle and clean my rifle, a gun I had never even fired in my
whole life. It was somewhat rusty and very dirty. With a little
oil, much elbow grease and much tutoring, I felt I had done a
good job. I carried that rifle on many occasions but never did
actually use it against the enemy. It was a reassuring piece of
hardware to have in one's hands.
Sparks and I made one reconnaissance along the line before
he left for treatment of his aching leg. After that, I was on my
own.
Our new outpost was located some 1,000 yards in front of
the main line, which generally followed the Bagac-Orion road. As
the days wore on, I learned a great deal about that dry bush
country. The rainy season had ended about December. The rainy
season would not begin till about May. The terrain was not
greatly different from our last station: hilly with broad areas
of more-or-less flat land. It was covered by high-standing
brush.
Each morning we would rise almost as soon as light crept up
over the east. Our Filipino boy would start a fire and cook some
rice. At times, we would be able to scrounge delicacies such as
milk (canned) or canned salmon. On a couple of very special
occasions, we had some ham, jelly and bread brought in from some
unknown benefactor. It was supposed to have come from
Corregidor, but I have no way of knowing. We ate it sparingly
and luxuriated in the exciting tastes we had seemed to have
forgotten.
Major Martin was not exactly what you could call a fussy
eater, but he did not like rice and was quite frank about it.
Now anyone who lives in the Orient either voluntarily or

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involuntarily and does not like rice even a little bit is in
trouble. Major Martin would eat only a portion of his rice each
day and though his portion was small and what was left was
small, we did not throw it away. In only a matter of a day or
so, it would sour. We had been told that this "sour" rice was
high in Vitamin B, an element we lacked. Sparks and I talked
this problem of Major Martin's over and decided that possibly we
could make pancakes out of the sour batter which Major Martin
would find palatable. There was one big hurdle to overcome,
though. We had to find some soda to neutralize the acid and make
the batter rise. I, as mess officer, concocted the idea of going
to the aid station and getting some bicarbonate of soda for a
stomach upset. Well, I got back to the rear area soon afterward
and headed for the aid station.
I begged and pleaded and threatened and demanded, but I
could get no soda tablets. I had made the mistake of telling the
Filipino medics that the soda was for Major Martin, whom they
knew.
"Major Martin will have to come in and get the soda
himself," said they.
I knew that Major Martin would not come in and so I gave up
the quest. Sparks even tried to get soda at another aid station
as we passed through their sector on patrol, but they too were
suspicious, or out of soda. In the end, we just mixed the sour
mess up and had fried rice pancakes out of a watery gruel of
rice flour and water.
As mess officer, as I have said before, I drew our rations
each couple of days. Each two days I would draw two cans of
salmon and two cans of evaporated milk for 20 men as well as six
ounces of rice per day per man. The 20 men accounted for the
American officers, the Filipino cooks and the half dozen
Philippine Scouts we had attached to our advisory group. It was
a pitifully small ration and we all lost weight and strength at
an alarming rate.
In my new capacity as lone American advisor, I set off
shortly after breakfast for my tour of the outpost line. To get
to the main line I would have to descend a steep trail some 500
yards and, passing through, cross the Pilar Road and out into
the open of a 200-yard wide river bed. I believe it was called
the Tiawit River. It was much like the wash of more familiar
California river beds, rocky with sand and a few small trees and
clumps of brush. This stream bed was, perhaps, 200 yards wide.
As I started out into the open, I picked up a dry branch or
broke off a piece of one of the small bushes. As Japanese
observation planes flew low, traversing the water course, I
would stand, still, hold the branch over my head and make like a
tree. There were times when this procedure seemed entirely

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adequate. There were other times when I knew that observation
plane had spotted me and would begin firing a deadly stream of
bullets on one of his low passes. On only one occasion, though,
was I fired upon and that came when a plane spotted me on the
side of a hill along the outpost line. That time, I was resting
beside a huge abaca plant. It must have been just a lucky
sighting for the plane was over 500 feet altitude. As the plane
began its dive toward my position, I knew my only chance of
survival was to lie perfectly still. The machine gun bullets
tore up the ground 50 feet away and I knew the gunner had lost
his sighting. Still, I did not move till he had passed out of
sight. I was afraid he could hear the beating of my heart.
At the far side of the dry wash there was a pleasant,
little stream about a foot deep and 50 feet wide. There was a
rocky passage that could be negotiated dry if one was careful.
Beyond this the dense cover ran into an abrupt cliff some 30
feet high. We had fashioned a trail of sorts up one of the
crevices. At the top the flat land fell away to gently rolling
country beyond. Another 500 yards and I would come to the outpost
line. It extended in either direction for about half a
mile, our sector being about a mile in length.
The same, somewhat incongruous pounding of rice, chattering
of greetings and broad smiles awaited me each day. I doubt that
the boys were glad at my coming. They were just naturally a
cheerful people. My job, as I saw it by this time, was to appear
confident, make a few reasonable suggestions and maintain a
relaxed but soldierly bearing. I would check the position of the
machine guns, fire a few rounds just to test their readiness,
swap an anecdote and move along the line. Just the fact that
they knew I would be around at least twice a day had its
beneficial effects. At least this is what I told myself. By
early afternoon of each day the gnawings of a ravenous hunger
had me drooping with an utter weariness. It was then that I
would seek out one of the several quiet, cool, and lovely spots
and sit down to enjoy the crust of bread or rice cake I had
saved from my morning meal. All by myself in the stillness of
the brush with lizards and an occasional wild chicken for
company, I would relax and try to forget the war. This was an
essentially beautiful place in spite of the buzzing insects, the
heat, and the rather inhospitable inhabitants. My thoughts would
inevitably travel back to the "good years," those days when life
was a simple routine of working at a job that was exciting,
stimulating and worthy of one's talents. I could not keep my
mind off my wife and her teaching job, figuring out the 14 or so
hours difference in time and her activities at that very minute.
It was a great source of strength to me to know that she would
have confidence in me and know that I was trying hard to do the

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best I knew. It was also most reassuring to know that while
others might have doubts about their women, I need have none. I
could visualize her beauty. I could feel the very texture of her
hair. I could almost talk to that keen, alert and discerning
mind; and, on many occasions, I did with soft and endearing
words.
After my rest and few bites of food, my path lay toward one
of the several protected areas of stream that traversed the
outpost. After watching from the protection of the bushes for
ten minutes or so, I stripped off my clothes and had a leisurely
bath, rubbing all over with a smooth rock in lieu of soap. Then,
having stood in a sunny spot to dry off, I dressed once again.
It was a simple ritual but a meaningful one. The whole sweating
belligerency of the war drained off me. I was refreshed both
physically and spiritually. I could face reality once again. The
loneliness of these days was a heavy burden. My friendliness
with the Filipinos was something that never got beneath the
surface. My contacts with Major Martin and all the other
officers except Sparks was brief, casual and almost perfunctory.
I was a disembodied spirit in an alien land doing a strange job.
I know that my thoughts turned inward during these days to an
even greater extent than I realized. Realization of the
impending doom that hung over all of us, the hunger that gnawed
at our stomachs, the fatigue that wracked our bodies made these
days of travail most discouraging.
Malobit
No spectacular incidents marred the events of those several
weeks I was alone. I remember one patrol with a Philippine
Scout, Malobit, though. He and I decided to have a good look at
some of the terrain well out in front of our post. Malobit was a
tall, good-looking, and well-trained soldier. He had spent some
20 years as a member of that well-disciplined group at Ft.
Stotsenberg and knew Bataan like the palm of his hand.
Malobit had explained to me that the Japanese garrison was
concentrated mostly around Balanga along the shores of Manila
Bay. Their forays, patrols, and reconnaissance was done on a
different scale than ours. Each evening the Japanese assigned to
patrol would be trucked out into position opposite our lines and
their work began from there. The daily reconnaissance was
limited to small parties of soldiers traversing the length of a
particular sector. True, they did cover all the front but they
knew that we were not going any place in particular. All they
wanted to do was keep track of our movements.

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“With care," he said, "we could move around almost at will,
scout food and ammunition dumps, note the more heavily traveled
trails and mark our maps for later artillery action."
This was somewhat different from the past patrolling I had
done. Malobit was an expert. He was also an expert with his
Springfield rifle. He had, I discovered not long after we
started, an abiding hatred for the Japanese. Malobit's chief
concern was stalking Japs. As we moved farther and farther
through the brush and open fields, I could feel the intense
concentration with which he surveyed each tree and clump of
bamboo. When I indicated that we should follow a well-protected
water course down to-ward a slightly rolling valley, he shook
his head and motioned me to keep well up on the slope of the
hill. Before descending the hogback, Malobit lay quietly for a
long time, his rifle at the ready. Then, he took careful aim at
a tree some 200 yards away and held his position, his finger on
the trigger. I could see nothing in the tree. Nothing seemed to
move. No breath of wind seemed even to stir the leaves. The
sweat rolled un-comfortably off my back and trickled into a pool
of muddy moisture where my stomach lay pressed to the ground.
Suddenly Malobit's rifle cracked, the sound causing me to give
an involuntary jerk. We lay very still for several more minutes.
Then I saw the body of a Japanese soldier come tumbling out of
that tree, striking branches as it fell. It fell almost as a
sandbag would have fallen, limp, solid, inert. We knew from the
very first that the Japanese soldier was dead before he hit the
ground.
Still Malobit did not move. I was going over the various
avenues of retreat we had open to us, picturing in my mind the
gullies, water courses and turns. I wanted very much to leave
that place of death. Not so, it appeared. Malobit rose slowly
and crawled almost 190 yards farther down the hill. We were
still pretty well protected by brush. With me following at a
decent interval, Malobit finally emerged into the open and
walked quickly up to the dead Jap. Malobit went swiftly through
his pockets for papers, turned the body over and spat on the
dead Jap's face. He then lifted his rifle butt and brought it
down with a crushing blow on the soldier's head. I winced and
shook my head violently. I reached out to fend Malobit off and
motioned for us to leave. Malobit just grunted and smashed at
the skull again before turning to follow me back the way we had
come.
My stomach was doing nip-ups all the way back to the
outpost that afternoon. I did not mention the patrol to anyone.
Especially I did not mention that we had stalked and that
Malobit had shot a Japanese soldier. I was haunted by the limp
body of that soldier with his skull crushed in.

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I never did go Jap-stalking with Malobit again, but we did
make many a short patrol together. On more than one occasion, we
hunted for food. With patience and a homemade trap you could
catch crayfish. The traps Malobit made for me and set in the
streams never did yield any food, though. I suspect that either
Malobit or some of the many hundreds of Filipinos got to the
traps before I did. Fruits and vegetables, which are supposed to
abound in a jungle area just did not abound. Those few trees
with edible fruits were stripped clean long before their harvest
was ripe. The wild pigs and big snakes of Bataan had long since
departed for the higher elevations to escape the noise and
marauding soldiers. I saw only one snake during my entire stay
on the peninsula. It was a lovely, coral-hued little animal
about the size of a lead pencil. On one of our forays, however,
we did come upon a good-sized iguana. These large lizards,
Malobit had told me, were wonderful eating. That is, the tail
was meaty, tasted like chicken and should be considered a
delicacy. The iguana we found, though, was a few hundred yards
outside our OP and was feeding on a very dead Japanese. As we
made our way silently along a narrow trail, we spotted the
lizard's tail; its jerky motions from side to side indicated it
was busy. As we came closer, we could see it was feeding and
half inside the stomach of the dead soldier. I very suddenly
lost my taste for iguana even though this was a fine specimen
about three feet long.
On one of my tours up and down the OP, I came across two
Filipino natives loaded with personal belongings. They were
obviously making their way through our lines to the interior.
This was not an uncommon sight, the natives having established
camps on the higher slopes of the mountains. There was something
about these two, though, that arrested my attention. One of them
had very close cropped hair. They were, in contrast to most
Filipinos, rather tall, well-muscled men. Too, I had never seen
a Filipino without the need for a haircut. They invariably wore
their hair long. They always took great pride in keeping it
washed, well-combed and long.
Both men were carrying stout cloth bags. I halted them at
about ten paces and asked them to empty their bags. Without
hesitancy the men began unloading. There was the usual
assortment of clothing, cooking pots and bags of rice. The last
item in one bag was a big headlight from a very old automobile.
It was a big, brass affair with a curved and well-polished
mirror behind the plate glass of the front window. It was old
enough to have antedated the electric lights of the present era.
It was the first time I had seen a carbide auto lamp since my
father owned a Stanley Steamer in 1916. I asked the men if they
had any carbide. They answered that they had. With carbide and

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water they could make acetylene gas with which to power the
lamp. They said the lamp was to be used for fishing in the
streams at night. I knew that it could throw a very powerful
beam of light. It might be even used for signaling. I had worked
with acetylene for many years and knew how effective, cheap and
easy it was to generate.
The men reloaded their bags and then, drawing my pistol, I
ordered them to retrace their steps back up the trail to one of
the Philippine Army groups. Malobit was there supervising some
boys in machine gun cleaning.
I asked several of the boys to talk to the men in Tagalog.
They could get no answer. The men, they explained, spoke
Visayan, another language quite different from Tagalog. I asked
Malobit what he thought we ought to do. He seemed uncertain. As
we conversed in English, I watched to see if there was any hint
that the men were nervous or were listening. They did not seem
to comprehend. In the end, I asked Malobit to take the two men
to Regimental C. P. for interrogation. On a later occasion I did
find out that the lamp had been taken from the men, but that
they had been released to go their way. I always did feel they
were Japanese sent out to direct gunfire. At least, they did not
direct it with that big old-fashioned lamp.
It was always very difficult to get prisoners. We would
like to have had some for questioning. From time to time,
heavily reinforced patrols were sent out from Regiment or
Division for the purpose of capturing some.
The Japanese soldier had been so well indoctrinated with
the idea of fighting to the death before surrender that it took
surprise and cunning to capture one alive and unhurt.
I heard of the case of one 50mm patrol jumping a squad of
Japs while they were sleeping early one morning and managing to
get almost back to our lines. Then a pursuing Japanese unit
headed them off into the mountains for a two-day game of hideand-seek.
The American officers and their Filipinos were running
low on food. The Jap prisoners had to be blindfolded and gagged
and led along trails by their captors. They had not been fed
since their capture and were growing weak. The second night of
the deadly cat-and-mouse game the officers realized they were
not going to get back if they had to continue to be slowed by
the prisoners. They were faced by a grave alternative. What to
do with the prisoners? The patrol could not continue to take
them along. They could not turn them loose.
In the end they decided that the Japs would have to be
disposed of, quietly. It was done with knives.
This story which came from a reliable source, always
disturbed me. I knew that it might very well have happened. The
prisoners were a threat to the security of the American patrol.

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Getting them back became a major issue. The disposal of the
Japanese was a rough decision to make, but it was a logical one.
As one man told me, though, I would not have liked the
responsibility of justifying this course of action to the
mothers of those Japanese soldiers.
In the warmth and comfort of our living rooms or over the
green felt covered table of a conference on treatment of
prisoners the decision might have been a different one. In the
loneliness of the jungle with fatigue and hunger and danger
clawing at your every movement, the most immediately effective
solution to a problem is usually the one that presents itself.
This seems to be just another by-product of war. The only sin in
war, it seems, is to lose.
I always enjoyed my associations with Malobit and with the
other Filipinos. They were a kindly and hospitable people. The
boys we had from Batangas Province all spoke Tagalog, the
national language of the Philippines. Their chatter was
incessant. They were all supposed to understand English, too. At
least, it was a part of their schooling. Whenever I had
instructions to give, though, and they did not want to
understand, the same stock answer would come, "I am sorry, Sir.
I do not speak English."
Those who did speak English did so with a delightful twist.
On one occasion in our command post our orderly was answering
the telephone. The caller asked to take with Major Martin. "I am
sorry, sir," said the orderly, "Major Martin is not presently
available."
"Well," said the voice, "make him available. This is
Colonel Wetherby."
"I am sorry, Sir," said the orderly, "Major Martin is
moving his bowels."
Many of these boys from Batangas were completely unfit for
military duty. When I asked about their induction to the service
I was told that their division doctors had also come from
Batangas and it would have been a disgrace to have disqualified
any of them who could stand erect and walk a mile.
It was generally accepted by all of us who had to work with
Filipinos that any relationship between the reports they gave us
and the truth was speculative. First, they would figure out what
you wanted to know and then tell you that and nothing more.
Sparks and I were constantly hammering at the boys to maintain
some semblance of sanitation. It was a discouraging and dismal
campaign. To each group of men under our charge, we would insist
on a latrine. We would have to personally supervise the digging
of the slit trench. We told them that each time they used the
trench they should throw a little dirt over the immediate area
to cover any effluent from ravages of millions of flies. After a

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week or so in any given area, we found the only use of the
latrine had been by Sparks or myself. Either the Filipinos were
terribly constipated, which I had reason to doubt, or they just
did not use the latrines. As one boy told me with some degree of
bewilderment, "Sir, why do you want us to dig a slit trench and
then fill it up?"
So, the flies prospered, dysentery flourished and the 300
men we were supposed to have dwindled to about an average of
100.
I have spoken briefly about our role as "advisors" to the
Philippine Army. I should, perhaps, elaborate on this function.
As Major Martin had pointed out, "You are not in command. You
will," he said, "familiarize yourself with plans, preparations
and disposition of troops."
He had indicated that I would take my instructions from
Captain Sparks, an admonition that was, by any shadow of a
doubt, unnecessary.
“You will point out to the best of your ability," said the
major as he unfolded a large map, "the alternatives to the
Filipino officers and help them select the best course of
action."
He had pointed out on the map the black crosses that marked
our positions along the outpost. Then he drew his finger along
the line of red crosses that, he said, showed the Japanese
positions. Then with very deliberate precision, he traced an
area some 500 yards in back of the red crosses and said that
this was the area we would be scouting.
Something akin to consternation and surprise must have
showed in my face for he said, "We want to find out as much
about this area as we can."
I said, “Major, that is a good quarter of a mile in back of
the Japanese lines. I don't know that I am equipped to do that
sort of reconnaissance."
"I don't want you to fight unless it is absolutely
necessary," he said, "but I do want you to cover as much of that
ground as you can."
As I had become used to going out on patrol with Sparks and
alone with a few Filipinos, my shaky confidence firmed up. We
seldom saw Japanese and when we did, we lay low till they
passed. We would start early in the morning, skirt the bamboo
thickets, crawl through the brush, note our direction with a
small compass and, having attained what we thought was a
sufficient distance, circle back. We would note any trails,
supply dumps or motor vehicles. It was nerve-wracking work and I
always came back completely exhausted. I must admit that I never
fired a shot or came very close to a Japanese soldier on one of
these patrols.

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On one patrol, though, led by a Filipino Lieutenant, a
couple of Japanese outposts jumped the Filipinos. The Filipinos,
being superior numbers, shot the Nips out of their tree perch
and withdrew. The Lieu-tenant brought along the helmet of one of
the Japs and his rifle. As he neared our lines, he began to
sing, jammed the helmet on his head and swaggered right up to
our outpost. One of our sentries took careful aim and put a
bullet right through the Lieutenant's head. It was just one of
those crazy things that can and does happen.
On another occasion, one of our patrols came in contact
with a group they supposed were Japanese. A terrific fight
ensued in which several men were wounded. Then it was discovered
the opponents were from an outfit on our left flank who had
wandered into our area.
It was times like these that made the war a dangerous
thing. We could hear the firing from our positions along the OP.
We did not have sufficient manpower to send out reinforcements
but we prepared for an attack. Runners would come in from up and
down the line as the Filipino officers placed their men. Most
often the runners would announce with great finality, "Sir, we
are surrounded. Lieutenant Somantin says we should withdraw."
Sparks would always be sure to write out an answer to the
message. He would also include a memo to the effect that there
would be no withdrawal until he, Captain Sparks, gave the order.
When we were finally relieved of our position, the Second
Battalion straggled in early one morning. We, members of the
First Battalion, were ready to move out. We were supposed to
have three companies of Infantry. As a matter of fact, instead
of the 300 men, our full strength, we had about half that
number. I was never able to find out just where the men
disappeared. Some were sick, some were on details in the rear
area. Many of the boys, I know, spent days on end wandering the
hills in search of food. There were those, too, who made trips
in to Manila by slipping through the Japanese lines.
When we were ready to make our way back to the Main Line of
Resistance, we presented what Sparks called, "Our counter attack
formation."
The soldiers stood in small groups, their ragged trousers,
bare feet, torn shirts and battered coconut fiber helmets giving
them the appearance of a group of castaways on a desert island.
There was a low ripple of excited talk and laughter, though. As
we moved out, the Filipinos almost to a man, swung their rifles
across their shoulders. Then with their personal effects hanging
from one end of the gun and their cooking pots from the other,
we trailed off down the path. The clanking of the pots, the
chatter of the men and the shouts of the officers gave the whole
procession a holiday atmosphere. The boys were tired, dirty and

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hungry. They were looking forward to a few days of rest. Both
Sparks and I knew the strain they had been under and we felt a
great relief at the prospect of fresh water and a little
relaxation.
Scrounging For Food
After our relief from the long stint on the outpost, I got
permission from Major Martin to accompany Captain Davy on a trip
to the rear area to scrounge food. As mess officer for our tiny
group of American officers and their Philippine Scouts, it was
my duty not only to draw the daily pittance of six ounces of
rice per man per day, but to forage for whatever else I could
find.
Bob Davy, who was attached to us for Liaison work as
artillery support officer, had an old Packard stashed away in
one of the deep ravines back of our camp. By the time we got to
it, though, someone had drained the gas and stolen enough parts
that we could not get it started. We hitched a ride with a highranking
Filipino officer in his command car and began our trip.
Along the dusty roads of the hills, we made good time. We
knew that Photo Joe, the Japanese reconnaissance plane, could
see the lively trail we were leaving, but he did not try to
attack. As we neared more open country close to the Bay, it was
a different story. The plane swooped low to see just what we
were doing. After pulling off the road several times, we made
the main road leading to the rear area. Now Photo Joe became
more curious. We pulled off into a clump of trees as he made a
wide turn to dive on our open car. He could not find us. We
waited in the secluded spot for an hour. We could look out over
the quiet waters of the Bay, see the gulls wheel and glide in
the morning sun. As I lay on the leafy slope under the trees, I
wondered if we, too, would one day relax and play in the sun. I
drifted off to sleep and was awakened by Bob Davy with the news
that Photo Joe had disappeared.
Our route lay toward Marevelis some 20 km to the rear. Much
of the terrain was flat and open. Our only course was to
floorboard the throttle and make a run for the woods beyond. No
sooner than we were committed to an open space of about a mile
than Photo Joe loomed up behind us. He had alerted the Japanese
Artillery, too. Now, with the plane diving and shells popping to
the rice paddies along the side, we raced at breakneck speed
around curves and over the rocky road. Photo Joe evidently had
only one gun, a 2Omm cannon and he was a miserably bad shot. He
did pepper the road behind us, though, and the red flashes came
to within 20 feet as we hurtled out of the open space to the
sanctuary of the trees once again. The Japanese shelling did set

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some buildings alongside the road afire and chewed up the rice
paddies in showers of mud and rock.
Bob Davy and I got off at the Philippine Air Depot where I
had worked before going to the front. The boys all greeted me
warmly. With the high casualty lists, they had not held out much
hope of ever seeing their shop "super" again.
I explained that we were looking for food. Their only
comment was, "so are we." I asked for anything they might have
to spare. Captain Ushakoff went up to his bunk area and came
back with a whole case of Filipino cigarettes. It was a
goldmine. We all knew that I might trade them for food somewhere
along the line. Filipino cigarettes were made with local
tobacco. They were longer than American smokes, napped in dark
brown paper and the smoke they emitted was strong enough to cut
like a new file. One good drag on a "Pino Butt" as we called
them, left you gasping and coughing. They were cigarettes,
though, and someone might be willing to trade for food. I
blessed Mike Ushakoff fervently, shook hands all around and we
set off on our trading mission. At least we had collateral.
At every outfit where we stopped we were met by the same
story: "nothing to eat." Most units were making coffee out of
their pitifully slim rice ration and would grudgingly offer us a
cup of the brew. They just did not have enough of anything to go
around among themselves, though. The war was in its third month
and the scarcity of food was beginning to tell in the pinched
faces and slackening gait of most men.
Our last stop was at the headquarters camp of the 31st
American Infantry Battalion. Here, too, they had burned some
rice, ground it up, and made a black brew which they offered as
a token of hospitality. This was the only American outfit intact
in the Philippines. They were being held back as a reserve unit
to run into any break in the line. It was the outfit scheduled
to relieve us at the base of Mt. Samat when the Nips broke
through. In the darkness of that terrible night a month later,
they would lose their way and fail to arrive. Now they were
friendly but adamant in their response that they had nothing,
but nothing, to trade.
In the end, we took our 50 packs of Dobie cigarettes and
hitched a ride back to the front, arriving late that night under
the protective covering of dusk.
On the way, we almost made a real killing. Along the trail,
we found a mule that had been wounded in a shelling of the
afternoon. Bob Davy and I would like to have finished the
stricken animal off with a 45-slug, but we had no way to get it
back to camp without help. Our problem was solved when an
officer and several Filipino soldiers from the Engineer group
came up.

-76-
The mule belonged to their labor battalion and they had
prior rights. Mule may not seem like a tasty dish to well-fed
folks, but it would have meant a wonderful meal for our sick and
weary men. Bob and I considered contesting with the Engineers
for at least half of the meat, but we knew our problem was
transport. It is not easy to move even half of a 1200-pound
mule. We still had five miles to go and the road was up hill and
down dale.
My only solace from the trip was the passing out of the
Dobie cigarettes next morning. Each man in the regiment got one
or two. The trading, swapping, and haggling that went on for
days over those few acrid smelling butts was a tremendous
psychological event. It broke the monotony. It was an exciting
event and my stock among the boys went up 100%. I found them
much easier to deal with after that. The fact that I would pass
out cigarettes for free was a staggering shock to their
understanding.
Japanese Attack
By the middle of March, the tempo of Japanese patroling,
shell fire, and bombing stepped up. We could tell from our own
patrols that concentrations of troops were maneuvering opposite
our lines. Big, solid, sod gun emplacements would reappear
almost as soon as we had blasted them with the 155 guns. The
trails and roads were more heavily traveled.
One of our patrols had found some papers on a dead Japanese
officer which indicated in very specific detail the plan of
attack for the final break through. Just why he was carrying
such a top-secret document is still a mystery. This paper, when
translated by GHQ, said in effect, that the Japanese Imperial
Army would make a frontal attack at the base of Mt. Sumat. There
would be a diversionary attack on our left flank. The frontal
attack would then swing off down the Manila Bay side of the
peninsula, the Marevelis mountains protecting the flank. It was
a good, solid plan and only a strong defending force could even
delay its consummation. We were not, by this time, a strong
defending force. The 41st Division, of which I was a member, was
stationed around the base of Mt. Sumat. We were, we assumed,
going to take the brunt of that first assault by the first
Japanese. Toward the end of repulsing the attack, we had
developed a fairly strong line. Our outpost was designed to be
only a device to make the enemy show his strength, alert the
Main Line and withdraw. On the first of April, a fresh group of
men was assigned to the OP. I and my men were brought back to
man the reserve lines to the rear of the Main Line.

-77-
The night after I was pulled out of the outpost, the
Japanese began their probing. They tested the defenses all along
the OP without doing more than hit-and-run. The next night,
after a thorough shelling, they hit a little harder and forced
the outpost to withdraw. On April 3, just as we were finishing
breakfast, we heard the dive bombers come screeching in. This,
we felt, was the beginning of the end of the defense of Bataan.
A few days before Sparks, who had returned from the
hospital, and I were caught in an exposed area by a dive bombing
raid. A small steel splinter had barely pierced my leg. It was
hardly enough to do more than break the skin. I removed the
splinter, no larger than a needle, washed the wound and forgot
the incident. That happened on Good Friday. By Easter Sunday,
the day the shelling began in earnest, my left leg was sore with
infection. Still, I had nothing but a first-aid kit of clean
bandage for treatment. The battalion aid station was far back of
our lines and, not only was I forbidden to leave the front but I
had little faith in Filipino doctors. Too, we were busy with
defense preparations. Our chore was to establish a flank guard
between the 41st Division and the Philippine Constabulary on our
left.
With the crack of dawn on April 3, the Japanese guns began
to hammer at us. Lieutenant Weiss was in the vicinity and came
over to join our party in the big foxhole under the tree. Our
Filipino orderly along with Sparks and myself, made the quarters
somewhat cramped. We settled down, our backs to the dirt walls,
to wait out the barrage. Instead of slackening off within an
hour as we anticipated, the enemy guns only increased their
constant hammering at our positions. There was the heavy roar of
big mortar shells, the scream of 6-inch shells and the high
velocity of small anti-tank guns.
We were in heavily wooded terrain and many of the shells
burst as they struck the tops of the trees. The firing would
rise to a crescendo of blasting, tearing, ripping metal
punctuated by the distant detonations of whole batteries firing
simultaneously. It was like the beating of huge drums with the
answering crash of cymbals. For a time, we kept track of the
explosions; some 30 to 40 shells a minute were exploding in our
immediate area. We found out later the Japanese had 240
batteries of artillery concentrated in the barrage. There was
nothing we could do but sit and wait. While we knew that only a
direct hit would really destroy our shelter, we also knew that a
stray fragment from one of those tree bursts could cut a man in
two. The jagged pieces of metal hissed and sizzled in the dirt
as they spent their evil force, kicking sand and rocks into our
hole. I picked up one of these spent fragments and just as
quickly dropped it. It was searing hot.

-78-
We were all men who had undergone bombings, shellings,
fatigue and hunger. We were at that state when a numbness sets
in that tends to block off a reasoning fear. You tend to accept
the situation, do what you can to avoid exposing yourself any
more than is necessary and conserve your energy for what may
follow.
From time to time, the shelling would slack off and a
flight of dive bombers come screeching in to lob a few hundred
small bombs down our canyon. This was almost a respite, for the
bombers, we knew, would lay their eggs and fly off. The guns, on
the other hand, could keep peppering away hour after hour. All
through the long morning we huddled under our tree, seeking as
much protection as possible from the big roots and the high
banks of dirt around the perimeter. We talked of the past, the
present and the distinct possibility of the salt mines of
Manchuria. We knew we were beaten men, both physically and
mentally. We had shot our wad and we knew it. We knew our boys
could not put up much of a real fight against well-fed troops.
We ourselves, were almost too weak from lack of food, constant
fatigue and utter despondency to resist much longer. We had lost
the will to fight. While those in the rear areas might cling to
some talisman of hope or outside help, we who had been involved
in the front line action knew the deep weaknesses of our
position.
The shelling continued through the afternoon. We did not
dare even get out of the hole to rescue the few bits of rice
left in the cooking pots. Sparks and I talked over the
alternatives. We knew that with darkness coming on we could
expect an Infantry charge. We sent our orderly out to the flank
position to bring in a casualty report. He returned with the
news that aside from a few slightly wounded men, the line was
intact. A runner crawled in from Regimental Command to relay
orders for a withdrawal just before sunset. Our flank guard was
to assemble along the regimental reserve line some 200 yards to
the rear. The main line defense was to be abandoned and a stand
made at the Regimental line where heavy bunkers for machine guns
were ready to receive our force. Log bunkers, sod rivetments and
a good field of fire made this position a sound one. As Sparks
and I talked over the mechanics of the move, Lieutenant Weiss
demurred about leaving the protection of the hole. His duty
station was with another battalion whose whereabouts he did not
know. We told him to stay with us and help get the men into
position.
With our plans complete we set the first lull in the
shelling as the time for a start. Weiss broke down and began to
cry. It was a surprising reaction for he seemed to have himself
very well in hand. Sparks climbed out of the hole first and I

-79-
followed. Weiss refused to leave. I jumped back into the hole to
help him out. With this, Weiss sagged to the bottom of the deep
trench and groveled in the dirt, blubbering hysterically. We
could not leave him there and we could not waste time coaxing
him along. I jerked the young officer to his feet and slapped
his face with my open hand, urging him to straighten up. I had
never witnessed a complete breakdown of this sort before and yet
it seemed to come as no great surprise. Supporting the still
blubbering Weiss with one arm I gathered up what personal
belongings I could with the other. Sparks called out for a
runner to inform the flank guard of our new position and went
off to supervise the withdrawal. I was ordered to get Weiss back
to the Regimental Reserve Line and determine the positioning of
our men. By dark, the shelling had dropped off to an occasional,
single, heavy shell. We knew the land attack had begun. All five
battalions of the 41st Regiment were congregating to man the
reserve line. Captain Goldberg, a fine American Infantry officer
with the 2nd Battalion was nominally in charge of the line. He
assigned me our sector and told me to stand by the phone to
Regimental Command. It was darkening. As our boys began to come
in, I could see they were frightened and jittery. I showed them
their places and collared several who tried to keep on toward
the rear. While I stayed close to the phone, Sparks got them
into position, supervised the handling of ammo boxes and showed
them where to set up the machine guns. There was an air of
frantic haste, some confusion and a babble of frightened
conversation.
The phone rang and I jumped. Such a matter-of-fact noise
amidst the running, shouting and shell fire was incongruous. I
answered and heard a wholly unfamiliar voice at the other end of
the line.
"Lieutenant Montgomery, command Blue,” I said.
"This is command Red," the other voice said, Command Red
was Regimental Headquarters. "You will organize your men in an
orderly withdrawal along the Pantingan corridor," the strange
voice said.
I asked for a repeat on the order and also asked the
speaker to identify himself. He merely repeated the order and
said, "This command Red."
I said, "I refuse to accept this order. Captain Goldberg is
in command and I will get him. You will have to confirm the
order with him."
I sent out a runner and Captain Goldberg came in, breathing
hard, in a few minutes. He conferred for some time with the
other voice and hung up.

-80-
"We are pulling out. We will withdraw along Trail 2," said
Goldberg. "First the 43rd, then 42nd and the 41st will bring up
the rear."
All this did not make sense to me, but an order is an order
and I had confidence that Goldberg and Regiment knew what they
were doing. He did mention something about the 31st American
Infantry coming in to relieve us.
In the excitement, strain and anger of the day, I had
forgotten my infected leg. Now, having been on it for several
hours, the ache was back with renewed intensity. We pulled as
many guns and as much ammunition as we could carry and formed
the men for the march back up the steep slopes of Mt. Sumat. I
was glad to be getting out of that hot spot but I knew we were
leaving an easy position for the Japs to take and hold. I
assumed that another unit would move in right behind us. The
American Infantry standing by in Corps Reserve was scheduled for
that unhealthy chore.
Our trek up the Stygian darkness of that torturous mountain
trail that dark, forbidding night was a nightmare of exhaustion.
My leg was swollen, painful and weak. The climb was steep and
our loads were heavy. I gave away everything I had except the
barest essentials.
The boys plodded on, silent and bone weary. We did not know
what the future held but we knew that after months of front line
duty we were not fit to fight our way out of a paper bag. These
boys had fought a long, wearysome battle, not only with the
enemy but with hunger, filth, and disease. They pushed on
without complaint.
Finally, about 3 A.M. and without a bite to eat for over 24
hours, we were halted and told to bed down till daylight. Sparks
and I lay down on a bed of mountain fern and were immediately
asleep.
It seemed that almost as soon as I closed my eyes there was
a stern hand shaking my shoulder. My eyes were opened to the
sunlight streaming through the overhead tree cover. Men were
moving around, chattering and preparing to move out.
Sparks spoke distinctly in my ear. "Come on, Monty, we are
moving back into the line."
I was stunned. "Move back into the line?" It was
unbelievable. It was true, though. A command car from HQ was
standing on the trail and an officer was conferring with Captain
Goldberg. We would move back into the reserve trenches we had
abandoned the night before.
My leg had stiffened in the night and now was hard to move.
It had the appearance of a well-stuffed sausage with taut skin
and the unnatural, reddish color. I hobbled off as we went back
down the tree-lined trail. It was not easy going downhill

-81-
anymore than it had been the night before on our way up. Sparks
told me we would be stationed along our previous flank position.
He also told me to take a break from time to time as my leg
required. Then, leaving me he went on to supervise the
Filipinos.
It was late afternoon before I got to the turnoff for our
position. I threaded my way along a pretty heavily wooded path
that crossed a stream. There was a small mountain cemetery
perched on the fern-covered slope. This was a path we had used
previously and I had always stopped for a few minutes to take in
the quiet, damp loveliness of the tree-shrouded hill- side. As I
sat down that afternoon, I could hear Japanese bombers overhead.
Then there was that terrifying whistle of bombs falling
close by. I rolled off my perch into a gully. The Japs were
trying to burn us out with phosphorus. The bombs exploded in the
treetops and the flaming, amorphous gelatin streamed down the
sides of the taller trees. The dampness of this protected place
prevented any fires from spreading, though, and the danger was
quickly over. I went on down to the stream, took off my clothes
and prepared to bathe. Another flight of bombers came over and
got half a dozen small bombs upstream from my pool while I
ducked under an overhanging bank. I was much too weary to care a
great deal and finished my bath.
I found Sparks an hour later and we prepared to spend the
night at the foot of a huge, pine-like tree, bedding down on the
downiness of the needles. Sparks had scrounged a scant bit of
rice and we slept the sleep of utter weariness. The next morning
I told Sparks I would have to do something about my leg. He told
me there was an aid station half a mile up the hill in the
Philippine Constabulary sector. I eyed that ominous trail that
zig-zagged up the steep slope and began my climb. As I neared
the ridge the bombers came swooping in to lay their eggs. Still,
I felt I must get to an aid station for sulpha before I could do
anything more about the war effort.
The road along the ridge was being mined as were the tall
trees that lined its edge. The aid station was close by and I
rounded a turn to view a pitiful spectacle. The bombers had
found their mark only too well. The whole station was a
shambles. Medics were busy carrying the wounded to trucks. The
dead bodies of other men were scattered over a half acre plot.
The Jap bombs had evidently hit in the middle of the assembly
area where newly wounded men had been congregated.
The doctor took a hurried look at my leg and ordered me to
get aboard one of the trucks. Within a few minutes, we began our
journey along the ridge and into more wooded country. I lay back
on the jolting bed of that rickety truck and slept. Hours later,
for the sun was on its way down, I was shaken awake.

Hospital Number 1, Little Baguio
-82-
We were at a collecting station. The doctor there just tied
a tag around my neck which said "Base Hospital." After a number
of other stops, delays, a scanty meal and hours of travel
through the blackness of the night, we arrived at what I knew
must be Hospital Number 1, Little Baguio. The sulpha and pain
pills the doctors had given me had eased my leg off
considerably. I was groggy, but filled with relief at the
prospect of rest and release from physical exertion. I gave up
my gun and ammunition as I was logged into the crude hospital.
One of the orderlies was from the Clark Air Base hospital. He
took me in hand and told me there was room on his ward, the Gas
Gangrene ward. I did not think I had gangrene, but I was only
too glad at the prospect of a real bed to resist. The
alternative would have been to go to the medical ward, a crudely
fashioned series of bamboo bunks built five decks high and
jammed into a small area on one side of the hospital compound.
It might be a bit smelly on the gangrene ward, but they did have
real beds.
As soon as I hit the mattress, I slept. I don't know how
long it lasted, but I was awakened by the whine of high flying
aircraft. That sound meant danger to me. Then there was that
fearful whistle of falling bombs, the big ones. By the time the
explosions came I was on the ground beside the bed, a sort of
subconscious reaction to the sound of bombs. The violence of the
shattering blast that followed and the hail of small rocks, tree
branches and dirt told me the bombs were big and their mark not
far off. The concussion rocked me from side to side and I
crawled a little further under the bed.
There was a brief moment of stunned silence, then a rising
tempo of moans, screams and shouts. The Saps had gotten two
heavy caliber bombs right into the middle of the medical ward I
should have been sent to had not my friend thought my leg was
gangrenous.
There was an immediate call for litter bearers. I got down
to the emergency ward as soon as possible. It was already filled
with the mangled bodies of men and women. Another man joined me
and we picked our way across the flat to the area where the
greatest devastation was evident--the medical ward. There was no
picking and choosing. We started with the first body we came
upon and carried it to the collecting station. The rest of that
morning is a complete blur in my memory. We carried bodies and
the parts of bodies for hours. A doctor with a mask over his
face leaned out the door of the surgery tent on one occasion and
motioned me inside. An American soldier was lying on the table,

-83-
his leg off at the knee. The doctor told me to hold the stump of
the leg while he sutured up the ragged ends of the flesh. The
patient, who had been given an injection of morphine, lay
quietly smoking a cigarette. The doctor said, "Hold a little
harder. We are losing too much blood.”
After the stump was bandaged, we carried the man outside
and lay him in the shade of a tree, notified the nurse and began
our searching once again.
In one big tunnel improvised as a bomb shelter from a large
piece of metal pipe, we found 19 dead Filipinos. A bomb had
exploded close to the mouth of the shelter and the concussion
had killed all the occupants without scratching a single one.
Blood streamed from their eyes, noses and mouths but not a one
had a shrapnel cut.
I had seen the same thing happen in a steep canyon where
eight men had been caught by a surprise bombing near the front
line. The bomb had burst close by, the concussion bursting the
blood vessels near the eyes, ears and in the chest.
I went back to the gangrene ward only to find the patients
hungry, unwashed and waiting for attention. Many of them were in
traction. Many more in casts. Their big, pleading, quiet eyes
followed me every movement. The ward men had been pressed into
service carrying litters, too. For most of the day, these poor
damaged and wounded men had lain quietly waiting for help. By
the time we had served food from the kitchen, carried our last
bedpan, seen that everyone had water and changed the dressings
on those stinking, gangrenous wounds, it was almost midnight.
Then we got a new batch of wounded men from the front. I
distinctly remember only one, a Major Chandler. He was a
smallish man and I lifted him off the litter to a shelter half
on the floor. All the beds were in use. He had a bullet wound in
the chest and that had been treated at the receiving ward. Aside
from tearing away his shirt to dress the wound, Bill Chandler
was still clothed in his dirty, mud-caked uniform. He also had
on a pair of canvas leggings that had, it appeared not been off
for weeks. I tried, in the light of a small lantern, to find the
strings to unlace the leggings. Finally, I just got a pair of
surgical shears and cut them off along with his pants. Later, I
washed him down as best I could and l left him to sleep. By next
morning, he was feeling much, much better and rested. His first
comment as I brought him breakfast was, "Monty, some son of a
bitch stole my leggings last night."
I did not tell Bill who that son of a bitch was till some
time later. Bill Chandler was a cavalryman and he loved those
leggings.
One American sergeant whom I had met at the front was
another of those in the ward. He was badly cut by a dozen pieces

-84-
of shrapnel. We got him into surgery and when they had finished
out under the trees, he called me over soon thereafter to say
that he was bleeding badly again. We took him back in but the
doctor, after giving me a shake of the head, told us to take him
back and to call the nurses to give him another shot of morphine
to make him as comfortable as possible. The next time I went by,
he was dead.
In a mass accident with hundreds of wounded, I saw the
necessity for painting "MS" (morphine sulphate) with iodine on
the patient's forehead. Were it not for this identifying mark
they might get an overdose.
We never did find out how many men and women were killed in
that raid. Many of the bodies were in small pieces. Many of the
wounded were trucked out to another camp as soon as first aid
had been given. The women were mostly Filipino who had gathered
around the edge of the camp for protection.
It is hard to say that the Japanese were aiming purposely
at the hospital, either. There was an ammunition depot 100 yards
or so up the hill and an Engineer depot 100 yards down the hill.
Those 500-pound bombs were laid in a string right through the
hospital though. There were raids later on and, though we
suffered some casualties, this was the worst one I knew of.
By late afternoon, I was bushed, beat, tired and hungry. My
leg, though, had not hurt me once during the day. The 24-hour
rest and the sulpha seemed to have done its good work.
I worked with the doctors and corpsmen on the Gas Gangrene
Ward f o r the next several days. My leg continued to improve.
The dysentery that had plagued me subsided. The food was some
better. It was my chore to bring the buckets of rice up from the
kitchen and distribute it to the bedfast patients. Some of them
I had to spoon feed. Though we had nothing in abundance, the
diet was far better than I had been used to.
One day a friend I had known at March Field in California
came to the ward from a front line position. I believe he had a
high fever and a bad case of dysentery. At any rate, I was able
to catch up on the news of others of our Air Corps outfit that
had come overseas together in October of 1941. This boy, Paul
Saurwein, was a big strapping intelligent fellow. As soon as he
got some rest and food, he rallied sufficiently to be of some
help on the short-handed ward.
Base Hospital Number 1 at Little Baguio was a strange
assortment of corrugated metal walls, canvas tarpaulins, wooden
shacks and concrete slabs. Much of it is a blur in my mind.
Still, for several weeks, it was a safe haven for me. The
hospital itself was located on the spur of a hill that ran up
from Marevelis, a small port on the channel between Bataan and
Corregidor. Above the hospital on the hill was the Ordnance

-85-
Depot with its tons of heavy artillery ammunition. Below us on
the hogback was the Signal Corps Depot with its vital
communication net.
I have no idea what the hospital was before it was a
hospital, but it had been converted from something else for
sure. Its original location had been not far from the Pilar-
Bagac Road. When the move to a rear area was made, the Japanese
were notified and not long after evacuation, the old location
was bombed and shelled into rubble.
I do know there was a surgery, X-ray department, dental
clinic and pharmacy. The Gas Gangrene Ward where I spent most of
my time was just a piece of cleared ground with a canvas tarp as
a roof, something more like a circus tent than a hospital. There
were beds and many patients, most of them with infected wounds.
Capitulation
The night of the capitulation of Allied forces on Bataan we
were told to turn in any remaining weapons in our possession.
Extra food was distributed along with cigarettes. In the early
evening the detonation of the Ordnance depot, 3 hundred yards up
the hill from us, began. There were huge quantities of small
arms ammunition, machine gun belts and some outmoded Stokes
Mortar grenades. There were, too, thousands of rounds of 155mm
cannon and anti-aircraft ammunition. Beginning with the small
arms ammo, the night was alive with crackle, punctuated by the
heavier blasts of the bigger shells. As the engineers swarmed to
their work, the whole world seemed to come apart with deafening
roars. Dust, small branches, and rocks filled the air. The big
gun ammo was usually cached in small dumps underground. The
powder of these guns was stored in silk bags and stacked like
cordwood. When one of these caches was touched off, it made a
vivid sight that would warm the heart of any Fourth of Julyreviewing
community. There was enough ammunition to last our
guns for a year in that dump. Even though much of it had been
shipped back to Corregidor, there was a great deal left to
explode.
As we sat in the dust-filled air, munching our candy bars,
smoking our newly issued cigarettes, we joked about the front
row seats to this expensive show. As the detonations cascaded
dust and dirt about our heads again, the earth began to shake
and tremble. An earthquake was in progress. It only lent a final
climax to the exploding bunkers. No one did much but watch the
tall trees bow and sway. There was little else we could do.
Finally the noise abated. I had been dodging bombs and shells,
snipers and noise for four months. My mind and body were weary
with fatigue and hunger.

-86-
I had come into the hospital on April 5. The capitulation
of the Bataan forces was accomplished by General King on April
8. By April 10, we were told that Japanese forces would take
over the hospital. The hospital, according to the memo, would be
run by Americans with no interference from Japanese soldiers.
However, only bonafide medical corpsmen would be authorized to
work the wards. As an officer, I and other ambulatory patients
were to be isolated in the area that had been used as a ward for
injured Japanese soldiers captured during the action of the past
months.
This new home was separated from the rest of the hospital
by only a few yards. It was enclosed with chicken wire, only a
nominal barrier.
The Japanese who arrived to take over the camp came with a
light tank and a couple of captured American command cars. They
were polite, firm and sloppily dressed as usual. I had wondered
about Japanese soldiers when I had encountered them at the
front. Their caps were all of one size tied with a string in the
back to make them fit the different head sizes. They wore wrap
leggings of W. W. I vintage. Their pants were truly of that
universal military size, either too big or too small. Their
shirts had a unique and very functional 4-inch hole under each
armpit. I always felt this would be a most desirable adjunct to
a tropical uniform.
As we patients stood watching the negotiations of the
Japanese officers and American medics represented by Colonel
Duckworth, one of our group questioned, "I wonder if any of them
speak English?"
The reply from the tank officer was quick, "I graduated
from UCLA."
The only time we were bothered by a Japanese sentry,
Colonel Duckworth reported the matter to Japanese headquarters
and the offending soldier was given a severe beating.
Our daily rice ration was supplemented by bread baked in
the hospital kitchen. We usually had a broth of meat for the
rice. It was very acceptable. During this period, it seems I was
hungrier than I had ever been in my life. I suppose the relief
from the strain of the fighting, the returning strength and the
inactivity contributed to my gnawing hunger. On several
occasions, I would steal out of the sick officer's quarters
about 5 A.M. and sneak along the sides of the dental clinic to
the kitchen. The first time I was given a cup of coffee and a
bowl of sugar for sweetening. I must have overstayed my welcome
and overeaten the sugar, because they refused me coffee the next
night. I did offer, though, to clean up the dough boards when
the bread mix was put in the oven. The scrapings I gathered gave
me quite a thrill. They amounted to a couple of pounds of dough.

-87-
I carried them back to our compound and lay awake figuring out
what I could use as an oven.
The next day I enlisted a friend, Lt. Tom Burkhart, and we
scrounged a very rusty old bake pan. We fashioned some of our
dough into small lumps. Next, we built a fire and burned it down
to a goodly s e t of coals. By rigging a piece of metal over the
coals and fashioning a bake sheet out of another, we were ready
for a bakeoff. The rolls had raised sufficiently and we placed
them over the coals, put the old bake pan on top and piled dirt
up around the edges to keep in the heat.
Our first batch was burned black, but we loved every bite.
It was hot, crispy and crunchy. The next batch came off almost
right and we enjoyed that one, too. The third batch used up all
the dough and it was perfect.
By this time, we had quite a crowd of admirers. We passed
out the perfect rolls and were repaid for our morning's efforts.
Though I tried on several occasions, I never was able to talk
the kitchen into sharing the bread dough with me again. The boys
working in a kitchen all during the siege of Bataan had no
concept of the desperate hunger and privation the fighting men
suffered. They looked upon us as animals not deserving of their
august attention. They deliberately threw that dough away each
night and spoiled it with coffee grounds rather than let us
reclaim it from the dough boards. It was a hard realization that
I had to digest. I was in no position to argue for I was outside
the Officer's ward against orders. Burkhart and I did receive
one glorious windfall, though. A Japanese sentry came close by
one day to prepare a meal for himself. He carried a huge, sixquart
or so can. When he opened it with his bayonet, he found it
contained American bacon. I suppose he had strafed some American
food dump. He tried the bacon cold, spat out the chunk he had
cut off with his knife and threw the rest into the leaves behind
our ward. With the first falling shadows of night, Burkhart and
I were struggling under the wire that surrounded our ward and
looking for the bacon. It was swarming with ants, but we
retrieved a goodly portion and had a number of wonderful meals.
Grease was almost nonexistent in our diet and this greasy, salty
bacon was an amazing treat.
I was in that compound till April 20 when we received
orders that all ambulatory patients would be moving out. During
the time of our recuperation, we had a chance to observe the
Japanese. They were busy setting up gun batteries around the
hospital. There was no firing from these batteries, but a number
of guns had also been placed over the hill from the hospital.
They fired on Corregidor, three miles off shore. The last few
days of my stay at the Base Hospital, Corregidor began firing
back with their big guns. I have no way of knowing the caliber

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of those guns, but the shells passed directly over us each
night. The noise reminded me of the times when, as a small boy,
my friends and I would lie under a low trestle and shudder as a
fast freight passed overhead. It was a feat of daring for us and
never failed to give me a thrill. Those big shells roaring their
way over our hill and exploding on targets a mile away were more
than just a thrill, they were almost terrifying. On one
occasion, a shell did drop short from a defective nose ring.
That huge bank of steel from what must have been a 12-inch gun
came fanning its way back toward our campsite with the whirring
of an airplane propeller in full flight. It did land short of
the compound and spent its force harmlessly digging up the
earth. For all of several nights, this firing and counter
battery kept us awake and on edge. The war may have been over
for the soldiers of Bataan, but Corregidor was still able and
willing to contest the Japanese right to their island fortress.
One other hospital some several miles up the peninsula was
not as lucky as ours in escaping Corregidor's fire. In answering
the Japanese fire, the "Rock's" big guns got several shells
among the wounded Americans. One boy I had soldiered with,
Decker by name, lost his arm at the shoulder from a shell
fragment.
The Road Out of Bataan
So, when the officer in charge told us to be ready to move,
I was not reluctant. I had had enough of shelling and bombing
and killing. Just to lie down at night without the thought of
waking up to the ear-shattering blast of gunfire or bombs seemed
to my tired mind to be the ultimate peace.
Those of us who were scheduled to leave the hospital for
our first taste of prison camp life were assembled one afternoon
and frisked by the Japanese guards. A weathered, old Japanese
sergeant was in charge. He was a "no nonsense" sort of guy. I
was relieved. Stories had filtered back to us that the boys who
had made the trip before, had taken a fearful beating. Unproved
killings had been numerous.
We knew, too, that the Japanese front line troops, coming
through a hard battle, had not lent themselves to leniency. It
was better to shoot first and talk afterward. There was only one
road out of Bataan. As men had surrendered, they were told to
head for that road and proceed north. Disarmed though they were,
they were enemy and many were shot by oncoming Japs. Once having
made the road, they were organized by Japanese MPs into groups
and escorted past Orion, Balanga, and on to Lubao. At this
assembly point, the organization was a little better and, after

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a day or two in a stockade, they were sent on to San Fernando
and thence by train to Camp O'Donnell.
The killings along this "Death March" were haphazard, if a
killing can ever be excused by the term. One American officer
was frisked and found carrying a loaded pistol. He was summarily
shot on the spot. Men were shot for falling behind their
assigned group. Filipinos took the worst beating and their
bodies littered the roadside as we passed on our way north. No
one had even bothered to bury them.
Many of the groups were marched for 24 hours at a stretch,
stopping only for 10 minute breaks for water. For a healthy man
to undergo such an ordeal would be trying to the extreme. For
starved, weary men to experience it was tantamount to murder for
many of them. Crazed by thirst and hunger and disease as they
were, after the first few hours of toiling in the hot humid
climate, death was to some the easiest way out.
One warrant officer, McGinnis by name, told me he just
completely played out at one water stop and refused to continue.
The Japanese guard kicked him repeatedly and threatened to shoot
him if he did not get up. He just lay there waiting for the shot
to end his suffering. The Jap turned and walked away. McGinnis
crawled off into the bush and lay till he had recouped some of
his strength. Then, surveying the terrain, he made his way to a
Filipino settlement close by. They hid him, gave him food and
herbs for his dysentery. Inside of a few days, he was strong
enough to travel again. He went back to the road, slipped in
with another batch of prisoners going to camp and walked the
rest of the way.
Our hospital group, being just released from treatment,
were loaded aboard trucks that had brought supplies up front. We
rode that first night to Balanga, some 20 km. There, we were
frisked once again and herded into a broad field. One Japanese
guard stole a watch from Lieutenant Bill Oliver. It was just one
of those things. The Japanese were, so the sergeant told us,
looking only for knives and weapons. Oliver told the sergeant
about losing his watch. He got it back in a jiffy and the guard
took a nasty beating.
We were lucky. That Japanese sergeant treated us as fellow
soldiers. I don't doubt he would have killed any prisoner who
tried to escape, but he was fair as long as we obeyed the rules.
He saw that we were fed regularly and not marched too long
without water.
We arrived at San Fernando the next night. We had walked
the last leg of the trip and were dogged. In the darkness, the
new contingent of guards took over for the usual frisking. By
this time, we had all learned some of the tricks of the game. At
Balanga, an officer had shaken us down for written material. I

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had a big stack of letters I had written my wife but been unable
to mail. These, I knew, were the sort of thing the officer from
62 (Intelligence) was looking for. When I hesitated to get
everything out of my musset bag promptly, the guard in back of
me kicked me vigorously. I dumped the contents but fast. The
bundle of letters rolled right up to the officer's feet. I
picked it up and showed it proudly. He shoved my hand aside and
pawed through the rest of the toilet articles and spare
underwear, not giving a second glance at the letters.
With this lesson in mind, I repeated the same movement of
showing the letters proudly as my first exhibit to all
inspecting officers from that time on. It seemed to work. The
only explanation I have is that they thought they were letters
from my wife or that they were letters I wanted the Japs to mail
for me. At any rate, I kept them and added to that diary account
for many months. When I was recaptured by the Americans in 1945,
the American Intelligence took it away from me. They did return
the contents, though, after the war, never having opened it.
After a night at San Fernando where I slept like a baby on
a cold cement floor, we were given a portion of very sticky
Japanese rice. It tasted good. Hunger can cover a great many
deficiencies in food.
We were herded aboard a string of boxcars early and the
last leg of the journey into Camp O'Donnell began. This box car
transportation was the first real sample of what we could expect
in the future. Each time we experienced the crowding, sweating
and fatigue of one of those trips it seemed to become harder.
The cars were small, narrow-gauge wooden things. We were
packed, 100 to a car, inside with one door open and a guard
standing in the en-trance. There was not enough room for a man
to even fall down as a number would have done. Men fainted and
were passed over the heads of others to the fresh air of the
doorway. As they revived, they were shouldered back to make room
for others being passed up.
By afternoon, we arrived at Capas, the rail head. We still
had a march of 7 km. or so to camp. This is only about four
miles but there were many who felt sure they would not make it.
I can still remember letting my head fall limp, watching my feet
and trying to just get one foot ahead of the other.

Introduction to Prison Life
CHAPTER VI
CAMP 0' DONNELL
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Camp O'Donnell was a former Philippine Army training camp,
located on a wide rice plain with dikes crisscrossing the
fields. It was a treeless, desolate place with a few shacks,
barbed wire fencing running around the perimeter and many gaunt
men peering at us from beyond the wire.
Our party was frisked once again and all razors and mirrors
taken away. Then we were turned loose inside. I was delighted to
see Sparks and Bob Davy waving to me as our bedraggled crew
marched through the prison gate. They greeted me warmly. Sparks
said he was sure I had been hit on my way to the aid station
that fateful day I left to have my leg treated. The bombers had
made a shambles of the aid station it was true, and had strafed
and pounded that trail all day. I just happened to make my way
along it between bombings.
I, in turn, had felt guilty at leaving Sparks. I was still
convinced though that getting out of the way was my only course.
I would have just been a burden on Sparks and the boys he was
working with.
As it turned out, he had been ordered to lead an attack on
our old positions. The Japs had dug in well and repulsed the
attack, almost getting Sparks and a number of others. After that
attack, the 1st Battalion was withdrawn to a reserve line and
saw little action again.
We, as new prisoners, were taken in charge at O'Donnell by
the American administration inside the wire. I was assigned to a
bamboo shack with other American officers. It was a building
about 50 feet long with a tier of bamboo slats forming the
sleeping area on either side of the aisle. Above the first tier
was another for additional men. My space, some 18 inches wide
was, of course, on the upper tier.
My first need was for water. I got it by standing in line
for an hour or so at one of the three spigots that served the
area's 4,000 or so men. During that wait, I learned the news of
the camp, the difficulties of the hike out of Bataan and the
high death rate at O’Donnell. It was, by no flight of fancy, a
health resort. Still I could not help thinking that there were
no bombers coming over and no shelling to be prepared for.
During my days since the war started four months before, I never
did anything without having in the back of my mind a possible
avenue of retreat or a handy foxhole in case of bombing. This
was not a matter of evading duty. It was just a precaution

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toward better fulfilling your assignment. You jumped into a hole
only after you heard the bombs "swizzle." Then, of course, you
got in quick.
Beside the 4,000 Army men at O’Donnell, there were some
2,000 Air Corps men in an area about half a mile away. Across a
road and in a segregated part of the same camp were between
40,000 and 50,000 Filipino troops. I was allowed free access to
the A.C. area and went over there the first night for a visit
with men of my old outfit. I had come overseas with 350 men from
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and when I was assigned to the
Philippine Army they had been sent to a sector on the right
flank.
I found several of the boys and we swapped experiences. My
stay was limited in order to return by daylight and be present
for the evening meal. It was rice in good quantity and a little
corn or greens, not too filling but better than I had been used
to.
Most of these Americans had been situated in positions
where they had access to much better food than Sparks and I had
at the front. Where we were starved down to almost a complete
breakdown, these boys had been living on something less than a
full ration but within the normal limits of a healthy diet.
The water problem at O’Donnell was a major concern to all.
The three spigots were turned on only a portion of each day. It
was here that I learned how to take a bath, wash my teeth, shave
and rinse out my spare underwear in 16 ounces of water, doing a
very respectable job at each. True, my razor had been
confiscated, but that was remedied by razors that passed from
hand to hand. I tried to shave at least once a week.
The second day I was in camp, I was assigned to lead the
burial detail of 100 men. It was then that I came in contact
with the grim realities of prison camp life. My men were
assigned to dig one grave a day. It was six feet by six feet and
six feet in depth. In that slaty clay soil even this was a
herculean task. We had only a couple of picks and several
shovels. I would work ten men at a time for ten minutes at a
stretch. The rest would rest in the shade of one of the shacks.
The sun boiled down on us and the still, hot air was
oppressively damp. As soon as our grave was dug, the burial
detail would come out with the bodies of those who had died the
night before and lay them in the grave, row on row, stacked on
top of each other as one layer was laid to rest. Each man was
left one identification tag and one was cut off for the records
and to be nailed to the cross we erected over the grave. Some
days the death toll was 40 men. The highest count I remember was
some 51 men. In a camp of some 8,000 men as we increased in
size, this was a staggering total.

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In the afternoons, my group dug latrines. It was hard work
and I had most of the stronger men in camp.
My tour of this duty lasted almost a week and I was
heartily glad to be rid of it. It was about this time, too, that
I got my first gripping, nauseating pain of dysentery. It came
all of a sudden one morning, I barely made it to the latrine.
The gassy expulsion, the pus and blood were all there. I had
seen many men fight this before and had been troubled myself on
Bataan. This time it was different. The pain was much worse and
the bloody mess seemed loaded with cockleburrs as it passed from
me. They rent and tore at my sides.
That night, I walked over to the Air Corps section of camp.
In making the rounds, I came across Charlie Graw, an old friend.
I mentioned that I had the G.I. trots, as we called dysentery.
Wet talked for a while and went our separate ways. After a
miserable night of running to the latrine, I was haggard and wan
the next morning. Shortly after breakfast Charlie showed up in
our compound and handed me seven Sulphathiazol pills . He had
gambled the night before and won them at poker.
This was the sort of thing that relieved those dreary days.
It did not happen often. Those sulpha pills cleaned up my
dysentery and gave me a new lease on life.
I well remembered this act of kindness and mercy six months
later when I heard that Charlie had died of dysentery himself
the night before. It made me more determined than ever that
Charlie should not have made that gesture in vain.
This act of Charlie's was only one of the several that
brought me through some very rough spots.
My next detail was to act as guard for the water hole. Our
camp was located close by a small river. The water carriers were
assigned to take 50-gallon drums down to the stream, fill them,
and return to the kitchens. The guards were assigned to warn the
boys not to drink the water, keep order in the filling and keep
traffic moving. We had little trouble with Americans. It was the
Filipinos who would flop onto their bellies and suck greedily
along the bank. The water was contaminated from effluent,
upstream bathing and other forms of filth. By boiling the water
for cooking, it could be made potable. Raw, it was a grave
danger.
To get to the river, I had to pass through a portion of the
Filipino camp. These boys were anxious to buy anything. The
death rate among Filipinos ran up to 300 a day in that camp of
some 40,000.
During this time I built up my small bankroll by buying
items in the American camp and reselling in the Filipino camp.
Cigars and cigarettes brought fancy prices and though I would

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have liked a smoke myself, it was more prudent to sell the
smokes and buy food.
I first met Eddie Dale when we were guards together at the
water hole at Camp O’Donnell. We spent a number of pleasant
hours talking about the war, home and our prospects for the
future.
Eddie Dale was a Captain of the 52nd Philippine Infantry.
From my contact with him, I judged him to be a fine officer. At
least, he was a very personable individual.
He had been brought into Camp O'Donnell early in May of
1942 from Baguio. When I asked how he had lost the two fingers
of his left hand he told me the story of his war.
Eddie was in command of a contingent of Filipinos assigned
to rear guard action in the withdrawal from Lingayan Gulf after
the Japanese made their landings there the middle of December.
Filipino troops were not nearly enough to stop the onward thrust
of the heavily reenforced Japanese Infantry and their tanks and
they were ordered to put up only token resistance, fight a
delaying action, harassing the enemy and slowing him down as he
progressed along the wide rice plain from Lingayan to Manila.
Being denied entrance to Manila Bay, this Pampangan valley
corridor was the best approach to the prize, Manila.
Eddie said, "My men were running low on ammunition and I
laid out the plans for them to cover the road and rendezvous at
a point not far from Tarlac. I took the command car and went
back to the rear for grenades and rifle ammo. As I neared the
meeting place on the way back I slowed down to a crawl. On
rounding one turn in the narrow road, I was met by a blast of
rifle fire that tore the fingers of my left hand to shreds and
wounded me in a number of places. I knew I was hit in the chest
and shoulder but I did not lose consciousness. I was able to
stop the car and slide out the left side, using the car as
protection. On the floor beside me had been a box of grenades,
half a dozen pistols and lots of ammunition. My forward momentum
had carried the car up almost under the crest of a dike along
the canal. The Japanese "Point" or forward element had been atop
the dike when they fired on me and had scrambled in behind it as
I pulled up. One by one, they came up over the parapet to fire
or charge at me and the car. I would toss a grenade and fire a
couple of rounds from the pistol with my good right hand.
This went on for what seemed like a very long time and I
was getting pretty weak from loss of blood. Finally, I ran out
of grenades and when the last Japanese came charging over the
dike, I realized he was out of ammo, too. He rounded the front
of the car and came at me with his bayonet as I crouched as
close to the ground as I could get. He lunged at me with the
bayonet and I fended off the thrust with my left arm. The

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bayonet went into my arm just below the elbow and I was able to
sort of lock it there by flexing my arm. The Jap leaned over me,
where the force of the lunge had bowled me and put his foot on
my head to pull out the bayonet.
It was then, I knew, I had to do something quick. I had so
little strength left. I was able, though, to pull the long
hunting knife from my right boot and slash at his belly. I did a
good job for he just toppled over on top of me. I felt such a
surge of elation I was able to get up, remove the bayonet and
even stagger down the road a piece before I passed out.
My boys found me there not more than a few minutes later. I
had, they said, killed 13 members of that Japanese patrol."
The Filipinos had taken Dale to the hospital in the
mountains of Baguio and there, with generous quantities of fresh
blood from willing donors, be was nursed along for a week or
more before the camp had to be abandoned to the Japanese. He was
still in much too serious condition to move and was left with a
hospital orderly to tend him. The Japanese continued the
treatment and care and though they scheduled him for execution
several times, according to Dale, he knew they would not shoot a
man who had beaten them in a fair fight against heavy odds.
These hot, grim, dirty days at O’Donnell were the most
morbid of the war for me. The lack of organization, the barest
tissue of hope and the prospect of a long period of captivity
gave little cause for optimism.
During these melancholy days at Camp O’Donnell, one of the
boys on my work detail was a sandy-haired youngster from New
Mexico whom I shall call Jim Smith. Jim, in his early 20s, had a
round boyish face covered with freckles. He also seemed to have
even more problems than the rest of us. Jim seemed unable to
understand how he could have gotten mixed up in so insoluble a
mess as prison camp. It was a matter of being unable to
comprehend the combination of forces that had landed him in such
an extreme situation. He, like many another young fellow, had
been a member of the home town National Guard unit called out in
the emergency prior to the beginning of the war. The transfer of
that unit to the Philippines shortly before the war still had
some elements of an extended camping expedition in it. Being
caught up in a real, live war though with vicious enemies
shooting real live bullets at you with intent to do bodily harm
was something else again. Jim just could not seem to put all the
pieces together. He was like many another boy, fresh out of high
school, conditioned by an adoring family to a life of very
moderate exertions.
Jim seemed to feel that any day now an army led by a fife
and drum corps would come marching down the dusty road and the
whole kaleidoscope of error would wind up in a thrilling and

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happy deliverance. I always felt that Jim was sure those
rescuing troops were just waiting in the wings for the proper
psychological moment to make an entrance. He just could not
grasp the reality of our situation.
One day Jim came to me with the news that he had been
picked for a truck detail leaving the next morning for a week of
truck driving for the Japanese. He said he knew he would be able
to buy food on the outside and could bring it back to camp. "If
you," said he, “will bank on me, I will split all the loot."
To me this was a sound proposition. I had done it with
others and gotten a little extra food. I knew I took a chance
that Jim would not come back to O'Donnell or that the Nips would
not permit him to buy or that some guard would strafe all this
money or a dozen other things would happen. It was just one of
those risks one had to take. I gave Jim ten pesos, a goodly
portion of my slim bank at the time.
A week went by and I saw some of the boys who had gone out
on the detail with Jim back in camp. They told me that Jim had
come back with them. As soon as I could, I looked him up.
Jim was very bland, honest and forthright about the whole
transaction. “Yes," he had bought food. He had been very hungry
though and had eaten it all. If he ever got any money ahead he
would try to repay me. I could do nothing but grit my teeth and
resolve to loan no more money.
I forgot about the incident until Jim hailed me in another
camp some six months later. He had, he said, another chance to
go out as a truck driver.
I had a case of yellow jaundice at the time and badly
needed some sugar, candy, or syrup. Jim seemed so genuinely
concerned that he promised to bring me in some even if I did not
have money to give him. In the end, his quick, boyish smile won
me over and I gave him a few pesos.
As it turned out, Jim did go out on a truckdriving detail.
He group stayed a week or so and were able to buy all the food
they had money for. When the work party came back though, Jim
avoided me like the plague. I finally caught up with him late
one night. He was still quite forthright and honest with me.
'Yes," he had spent the money on candy and had eaten every bit
of it himself. What is more, he seemed to have no qualms about
his action.
I began a little inquiry about Jim Smith and found that he
was a real "con" artist. His smile, his boyish face and seeming
innocence had served him well in borrowing money. As far as I
could find out, he had never repaid one thin dime. So my only
consolation was that I had not been the only one to play "patsy"
for Jim Smith.

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I really didn't blame Jim a great deal. I doubt that I
needed the food any more than he did. It was that natural, easy
way he had of getting his bankroll that bothered me. I have
often wondered how the method worked after he returned to the
States.
There were a lot of "con" artists in prison camp. There
were thieves, "fast buck" operators, short changers, and fast
talkers. Jim, as far as I could tell, was the smoothest I ran
into. He told you exactly what he wanted and he managed to get
it a great deal of the time. The boys who used more deceitful
means could be traced down and pounded into submission. Jim, at
least, made you grin and bear the loss.
If I have mentioned Camp O'Donnell somewhat briefly, it is
because I was there only a month. For me and for some 15,000
other Army, Navy and Marines captured on Bataan and Corregidor,
this was the first prison camp, probably the worst and certainly
the most deadly. I have no idea how many thousands died there. I
can only remember the gaunt staring faces of those helpless men
as they lay with the backs in the O'Donnell hospital corridors.
Many of them were too weak to go outside to relieve themselves.
There was the stench of death about that place and I went up
there on the hill only a couple of times. There must have been
doctors but I saw none. There must have been orderlies but I saw
none. The sick men were assigned a space a foot or so wide on
the floor of the big, bare building with its many wings.
The Japanese had separated all the high ranking officers
from their units and sent them off to Japan. Thus, we were
stripped at the very beginning of the regular channels of
command. By lumping enlisted men and officers together, the
confusion was furthered. This disorganization was fostered by
the Japanese as a device to prevent escape attempts and to keep
us more tractable.
As far as I could tell there was not a great deal of
security around Camp O’Donnell but the men knew their chances of
escape were limited by lack of food and their color.
The one thing that haunts my memory of O’Donnell is the
pile of bodies that awaited us each morning. The dead were
stripped of all clothing except a pair of shorts and an I.D. tag
and carried out to a spot under the building awaiting burial.
The flies, the ghastly, cadaverous appearance and the strangely
waxen skin always shook me. I was even more shaken when the face
of one of the men who had helped with the digging of graves
appeared one morning in that forlorn row of cadavers. The man
had not been well when he worked for me and had just failed to
awaken one morning.
It was here, too, that my friend, Captain Russell Sparks,
finally died of Amebic Dysentery, the disease that killed many

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another. Danny Pruitt, with whom I had served for a number of
years and who had gone to the front with me was buried by my
detail on one of those sad days.
The Japanese seemed to have little more organization than
we in those first parched, hungry days. We saw little of them
except for those who walked the wire fence around our prison. My
orders were given me verbally by my barracks leader each
morning. As one of the stronger men, I had little time to dwell
on the deadly aspect of camp life. I had my digging details and
my stint at the river guard. In the desolate, treeless heat of
camp that job at the river was a gentle respite. A few trees
that lined the bank offered shade and a token of natural beauty.
The rest was all like a bad dream.
As we passed through the fringes of the Filipino camp, we
could see the continuous trail of bodies of dead men from that
camp being carried to their burial ground. They lost, according
to the best reports I got, some 300 men a day.
It was not long before even the Japanese realized that
O'Donnell had to be cleaned up. I was among the first
contingents to leave that place of death. *
I stayed at O'Donnell for only 30 days. About 1,000 of us
were moved close to the middle of May. It was the same procedure
all over again. There was the 3 A.M. start, the long hike to
Capas and the loading into boxcars. This time the trip took all
day. I was second in command of a car. The heat, stench and
crowding was worse, it seemed, than our trip from San Fernando.
My money did come in handy though. Atone station we were
permitted to buy some fruits and candy. We were in that boxcar
for 12 hours before arriving at Cabanatuan. The actual distance
was not great but the train had to double back to the main line
and reverse its course to get to Cabanatuan.
We were herded into an enclosure for our night's stopover.
The next morning, we trekked the dozen or so km to the new camp,
Concentration Camp Number 1.
CHAPTER VII
CABANATUAN
We arrived in the blistering heat of the noonday sun,
ragged, tired and hungry. What we saw was a series of large
fields on slightly sloping ground crowded by a conglomeration of
* 22,000 Army, Navy, Marine were captured by Japanese forces in the
Philippines in 1942. Some 12,000 of these captured with the surrender
of Bataan April 8, 1942; another 8,000 or so when Corregidor fell in
May, 1942. Another 2,000 men were captured with the capitulation of
the Southern Islands, including the Del Monte Air Base on Mindanao.

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wood shacks, palm thatched barracks buildings open on the sides
and a dry, treeless expanse in all directions. It was only a
matter of weeks before that dry, dusty expanse became a quagmire
of sticky, oozy, black mud and one series of puddles between
unpainted buildings.
Our group of first and second lieutenants was assigned to
several small buildings not far from the Japanese section of the
camp. My group consisted of seven officers in one room about ten
feet long and seven feet wide. It was to be my home for the next
six months.
Cabanatuan had, as had Camp O’Donnell, been a Philippine
Army training camp for some time before the war broke out. When
the Japanese took over the island of Luzon, they immediately
occupied the camp with their own men. The first thing they did
it seems, was to scavenge all metal from whatever source and
ship it to Japan. The camps we were bivouacked in had little
water supply because the metal water lines had been dug up. Even
the narrow strips of corrugated metal that formed the cover for
the ridge line of the building roofs were missing. This strip
protected the vulnerable area when the torrential tropical rains
came pouring down.
Consequently, the roofs of all the buildings leaked badly.
One man I knew, who was sent to Manila to work as a stevedore,
told me how he saw Japanese soldiers loading a whole
warehouseful of new electric refrigerators aboard a freighter
bound for Japan. The refrigerators were picked up by a huge
crane in its grasping metal fingers, moved up to a position over
the hold and then unceremoniously dropped onto the pile of
others some fifty feet below. I suppose the boxes were melted up
and finally came out as part of the Japanese war machine.
The several thousand of us in that first contingent at
Cabanatuan had high hopes for this new camp. I have often heard
it said of a soldier that the only places he really likes are
the places he just left and the place he is just going to. We
had reason to have hopes for Cabanatuan. We knew it could be no
worse than Camp O’Donnell, the pest hole we had just left. At
Camp O’Donnell, we had neither organization, discipline,
adequate food nor water. Our men, beaten in battle and kicked
into submission by a cruel enemy, had died like flies almost at
the rate of 50 men a day the month I spent there. So, we looked
forward to this new camp, a camp the Japanese promised would be
a virtual Paradise. Cabanatuan was better by far than Camp
O’Donnell but it was here that my remaining energy began to slip
away in ever increasing portions. By the time October rolled
around, I knew that if I did not make a change for the better
and soon, I would leave my bones floating in that huge mudpuddle
that was called a graveyard. A great number of my good friends

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were already there. Arthur (Swede) Carlson, with whom I had
worked for many years was out there in the mud as was Charlie
Graw. Charlie was the man who had gambled all night to win
enough sulpha to cure my dysentery a few months before. Alf
Crabtree was there after losing a brave fight with both malaria
and dysentery. There were uncounted others whose bodies had to
be pushed back down into the mud each morning as the burial
details brought new bodies from the night's toll.
In the beginning at Cabanatuan, we did find the sanitary
facilities some better than at O'Donnell. The latrines we dug
were supplied with lime and even covered during the first few
months. Water was not such a problem. One had only to stand in
line for half an hour. Still we could get only a gallon of water
at a time. Though it was difficult to get larger containers, I
did manage to trade for a five-gallon can. I would get up at 3
A.M. in the darkness of the tropical night and join the galley
water carriers who supplied the kitchens to obtain an additional
water supply. It is amazing how well off we felt with the fivegallon
can of water standing close by. I was challenged one
night, though, by one of the American water spigot guards and
that ended our illegal luxury. From then on each of the men had
to fetch his own gallon of water to contribute to the community
supply.
A night or so before I was challenged by the water guard, I
came a cropper but good. I had stood in the line and gotten my
five-gallon can full and started back to the bodaga. It had been
raining that night and the dikes of the rice paddies were
slippery. It was about all I could do to handle the big can
filled with the precious water. Just as I topped the last dike
before entering our bare room, I slipped and spilled the con-
tents of the can. It was a heartbreaking loss. It was also one
of the few times I just lay in the mud and cried.
There were four sections to Cabanatuan. Three of the
sections were quite closely linked and separated only by a
barbed wire fence with open gates in between. The fourth, the
hospital section, was across a road and some distance away. By
assembling at a given point after supper in the evening, we
could be escorted in a group to visit friends in the hospital. I
went over there only once that I remember. It was such a
depressing sight that I could not face it. The accommodations of
the hospital were no different than those in our sections. The
men, though, were not expected to work and most of them were
very sick indeed. Malaria, dysentery and skin diseases seem to
have been the major problems. Most of us resisted going to the
"Hospital," feeling that it was a place of no return.
In each of the other sections of Camp Cabanatuan, there
were some 4,000 men, about 12,000 in all. The number may have

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been more-or-less but that is about correct. Within a short time
of our arrival at the new camp, I was put in charge of a group
of 65 second and first lieutenants. They were from all branches
of the military service. I bad an adjutant, a “mustang" like myself
who had become an officer from the ranks but who had a
background of training. We were called upon to make assignments
of our men to lead work parties, take the count or "bango" each
morning and evening and carry out such other orders as were
assigned by Lieutenant Colonel Stubbs, our group leader. As a
"sub-group" leader, I had certain privileges and
responsibilities. I did not have to take work details out myself
but I had to see they were managed. I was responsible for a
correct count each morning and evening. This was a highly
important function. I personally carried the list of men present
in our building to American Headquarters each evening.
One night a courier notified me to appear at Headquarters
"on the double." When the tallies of the evening count had been
added up and turned in to the Japanese, it was found that there
was one man too many in camp. The Japanese administration was
furious. Our senior officer tried to explain that we had
probably counted one man twice and that we could straighten the
mess out in the morning. The next morning the same count came in
and again the Japanese were furious. Somehow, somewhere in that
group of 12,000 men there was a man being counted twice or
someone who should not be in camp.
That night we went to Headquarters prepared to stay until
we discovered where the problem lay. The American adjutant (we
always had a chain of command inside the wire) would call out a
name. If I had that name on my list, I would raise my hand and
so indicate. Each of the other sub-group leaders would check
their lists to be sure they were not counting that same man. We
went down the list for almost 5,000 names before we found the
man who was being counted twice. He was assigned to a small aid
station and was supposed to sleep there. He was counted as
sleeping there. The man, though, was sleeping in a nearby
barracks and was being counted there, too. It was long after
midnight that we found the mistake and were allowed to go back
to our bodaga.
On another occasion there was a terrible ruckus in the
Japanese part of the camp. Several Japanese soldiers were having
a drunken brawl. We watched from behind our buildings while
several Japanese officers quelled the melee and beat the men
unmercifully with their sword scabbards and their fists. The
Japanese officer had the absolute power of life and death over
the men under his command. I have been Japanese soldiers stand
stiffly at attention while an officer beat him about the head
and kicked at his shins. When his helmet was knocked off, he

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would lean forward, retrieve it and stand back in a stiff,
military position again. Wham, he would get another blow in the
face.
There were many tragic incidents during the six months I
spent at Cabanatuan. Probably the most melancholy and agonizing
one involved several boys who had in some manner bribed a guard
and were being let out through the barbed wire each evening to
go to a store a few kilometers distance to buy food. They would
time their escapades carefully in order to be back at the
appointed place before the guard went off duty. Something went
wrong one night and the guard was relieved early. When the boys
came back with their big bag of food, the new sentry marched
them all off to the Japanese guardhouse. The next day, the three
men were tied up to stakes in the hot sun for hours. An American
doctor prevailed upon the Japanese commander to let him have a
look at the boys when one of them obviously had fainted. The
doctor, so I was told, gave each man an injection of morphine to
ease his pain. Both the Americans who had been caught breaking
into prison camp and the Japanese guard were duly tried by
Japanese court and found guilty and sentenced to death. As one
of the Americans was being led out to dig his grave, he broke
away from his captor and ran into camp trying to hide. He was
soon found, and received more severe beatings. Each of the men
then was forced to dig his grave and stand beside it as the
squad of Japanese soldiers lined up and methodically shot each
man in turn. We were forced to line our men up and witness the
executions.
I do not know how many men escaped from Cabanatuan or if
any escaped. I have told how we were placed in "security groups"
by order of the Japanese. As sub-group leader, I grouped the
names of ten men together and turned the names into the camp
Headquarters. If any one of those men escaped, the other nine
were to be shot. Any who supervised them were to be disciplined,
too. As far as I know, this drastic punishment was never exacted
at Cabanatuan but was carried out at a small camp in Batangas.
The tragedy of Cabanatuan was not so much in the physical
punishment meted out by the Japanese as in the lack of even a
rudimentary sanitation system, the lack of an adequate diet and
apparent hopelessness of our position. The last accurate count
of deaths I heard was for the month of August, 1942, when 35 men
a day died. Some months may have been worse and some better than
this. It was during this period that men just seemed to die in
the night for no apparent reason. The space allotted to us was
so limited that when you awoke in the morning and felt a cold
body next to you, you quickly got up and sent a runner for the
doctor. The man was pronounced dead and carried off.

Rice, Rice, Rice
-103-
Our diet at the time was about a pound or more of rice a
day, served either twice or three times daily. There was little
to vary the meals but, from time to time, we had a little corn
or sweet potatoes. We gathered the greens that grew along the
canals and cooked them. It was roughage and it was leafy.
The Japanese furnished the rice, doled it out in prescribed
quantities, be those large or small. On only one occasion that I
remember did they make any concession to outside influence. That
was the time in the middle of 1942 when a Swiss Red Cross
representative was allowed to "inspect” the camp. He got no
closer to the prisoners than 100 yards or so. I saw him, dressed
in a dazzling white suit, conferring with some Japanese
officers. At least, I was told this was the Swiss Red Cross
representative.
That was the day we had chicken for dinner. When we went
through the chow line that evening, we each got a piece of
chicken. It was doled out, a sliver to each man. The Japanese
had brought 4 chickens into camp that morning and delivered them
to the mess of our group. Those 4 scrawny-hens were to be
divided up into 4,000 pieces and each man was to get a piece of
chicken. I was told that the Japanese showed the Swiss Red Cross
man the menu or a menu, which said "Rice with chicken." We could
not deny that we had chicken. Not only that, we had a lot of fun
over that chicken. It was a grim joke and we knew it but still
there were elements of humor which could not be overlooked.
It was about the middle of my stay at Cabanatuan that I
made the decision to trade my fountain pen for a lemon to ease
my scurvy-sore mouth. I made contact with a Jap guard and he got
me a lemon. It took me at least two days to eat that lemon but
it helped my mouth. I don't know why I had such an aversion to
trading off my fountain pen for I had no ink for it. Still, it
was a symbol of my previous life and I had risked hiding it
during the many searches.
There were certain combinations of factors at Cabanatuan
that made the situation unique. As I have said, we were beaten
men and had not recovered from that beating. We had lost our war
and that is a hard reality to face. Too, we had been through an
ordeal of death and violence not only on Bataan and during the
march out of Bataan, but in the pest hole that was O'Donnell.
The senior leadership among the Americans, the highest ranking
officers, were determined to bring some order out of this chaos
and anarchy that had developed during the days when officers
could exert little control over their men. Discipline is an
absolute essential for survival in prison camp or under
conditions where men must live in congestion and deprivation.

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The American military leadership, though, was not
sufficiently versed in the intricacies of command, not
experienced in the habit of real leadership. During the long
years of peace between 1921 and 1941, orders had been decided
upon, and given and obeyed with a minimum of delay. An officer's
insignia was enough to insure that he was respected, believed to
be right and obeyed. Many of our officers had become so used to
being obeyed without question, that they had forgotten the
cardinal rule of leadership, that the leader must first be a
leader of men.
At Cabanatuan, then, the senior American officers set up a
Headquarters inside the wire and were duly recognized by the
Japanese as the avenue of transmittal of orders to the troops.
This Headquarters began issuing orders as though they were in
complete command in a peacetime situation. "No man would draw
more than one gallon of water per day," "Enlisted men would
observe strict military courtesy with officers," "Military court
martial boards would be convened to handle cases of disciplinary
action and infractions of the rules."
This was, I do not doubt, an honest attempt to bring some
sort of order out of the milling throngs of men who were, to all
intents and purposes, leaderless.
It was not long before the system broke down with a
resounding thud. No one really believed in the orders or paid
much attention to them. A man was a man when he was a prisoner
of war and the law of the jungle prevailed. The Americans had
little recourse to any effective disciplinary action other than
to turn violators over to the Japanese. Only in extreme cases
were they willing to do this. Some men were confined to a small
stockade, but this practice was soon abandoned. As inhuman
conditions of privation already existed, this seemed too much.
It took at least three months for the American
administration to realize that leadership under great stress
requires far more than a symbol of authority and a loud voice.
In the early days of Cabanatuan, I heard one high ranking
American officer say, "It has always been the custom for the
officers in this Army to be the privileged class and I see no
reason to change that procedure."
There were other high ranking officers, though, who knew
and practiced the art of command and exercised the function of a
true leader. One of these was my senior officer, Colonel Stubbs.
Lieutenant Colonel Stubbs would not permit any food on his
table that was not available to all the men under him. He would
keep the same hours of work and observe all the restrictions
imposed upon his junior officers and men. He was out among his
men when they were at work and when they were in the barracks.

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He knew their problems and he was respected for his
availability.
During this whole difficult period, money and clothing and
extra food were smuggled into Cabanatuan. I cannot say for sure
just where it all went but I was given to understand that much
of it was diverted by senior American officers to their own use.
An army may run on its belly, but the quality of leadership
is just as essential to the maintenance of order as food and
living conditions.
In October came the chance to volunteer for a move. We knew
not where but the grapevine had it that we were to go to Davao.
I promptly sent in my name.
One of the conditions for qualifying for the work detail of
1,000 men was to pass a physical examination. I was woefully
weak, half blind, swollen with beri-beri and unable to stand for
any extended period of time. Still, being the officer who picked
the men from my 65 junior officers, I put myself on the list.
Luckily, the physical consisted of lining up, standing in the
hot sun for an hour, having a Japanese officer pass down the
line and walking back to the barracks. When the list came out,
my name was on it.
Trip to Davao
We left Cabanatuan at 5:45 A.M. October 27, 1942. In the
cool of the early morning we marched off down that muddy road
toward the town of Cabanatuan some 10 km away. Each of us
carried his personal gear consisting of a blanket, mosquito bar,
mess kit and very little else. To counter the ache in my feet
and legs, I had the realization that at least we could not be
going to a worse place.
The last few kilometers of that morning hike are a blur in
my memory. Had it not been for my friends, I would not have made
it at all. I dropped my pack, discarded my canteen and belt to
lighten the load and stumbled on barely putting one foot in
front of the other. Finally with the boys on either side lending
me a hand, we arrived at the station. We loaded aboard the small
boxcars in the usual sardine fashion, 100 men to a car. There is
a story, of course, about the small cars holding 40 men or 8
horses. The Japanese evidently had not been indoctrinated with
the legend. In the heat of the tropics, those metal cars were so
hot you did not dare lean too long against the metal. It was
well into the afternoon before we arrived in Manila and marched
to the dock.
The cold rice we carried in our mess kits was our food for
the day but we were promised a good meal of meat aboard the
ship. It is amazing how good news of this sort can pick up the

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spirits. As we staggered up the gangplank, we were dished out a
good portion of corned beef in our outstretched mess kits. I
could hardly wait to set my gear down to get at that delicious
meat. With the first mouthful, though, all my fondest hopes as
well as my hunger left me. It was corned beef all right, but
pickled in brine saltier than I had ever tasted. My mouth, sore
from scurvy, could not tolerate the horrible bitter taste. I
spat it out and traded the rest for unsalted rice. The
disappointment of the disillusioning meat stayed with me for
days.
Our quarters aboard the ship were, of course, in the hold.
Tiers of wooden platforms had been built up to accommodate the
transport of troops. I suppose the Japanese soldiers had the
same comforts as we prisoners. At least, it was obvious the
decks had been used before and by a very untidy group. The
shelves were about six feet wide and the shelf above was just
about four feet higher than yours. It meant that you could crawl
in, lean against the bulkhead or lie down. Each man was allotted
the usual 18 inches-wide space.
We were allowed top side but after negotiating that metal
ladder out of the hold a couple of times, I felt the heat and
stench of the hold were less painful than the climb out and in
again. There was not a square foot of space to do more than
stand on the deck either. Standing was what I did poorest, so I
just stayed in the hold most of the 12 days of the trip.
The rice aboard our cruise ship was somewhat limited but of
good quality. The scurvy that kept my mouth aflame and the raw
sores that covered parts of my body kept me awake much of each
night. I tried to relax and sleep as often as the pain would
permit. One friend found a batch of Ticki-Ticki which he gave me
with the assurance it would cure my scurvy. Ticki-Ticki is the
rice hull preparation containing a high Vitamin B content that
is husked off the polished rice. In its refined form, it is
often taken as an elixir by those who eat polished rice. As I
got it though, the stuff was merely a branny sort of meal, with
a yeasty flavor. I ate all I could get and I believe it helped.
With the pain, loss of sleep and generally depleted
physical condition, I began to have hallucinations. I would
dream of cold baths, eating wonderfully greasy butter and the
cool lawns of my back yard in Riverside. When I awoke from one
of these dreams, I would have crawled the full length of the
sleeping deck, pawing my way over the solid floor of bodies. The
boys knew I was in bad shape and were gentle as they restrained
my movements. We were all sick, weary, sweaty and filthy. The
everpresent dysentery went up almost as soon as the ship was
underway. I, for some heaven-sent reason, was not affected. I
went the whole 12 days of that trip without a bowel movement.

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With a limited amount of low residue diet there was just nothing
left of my rice, I suppose.
By the time we had made a stop at Cebu, I seemed to pick up
a bit. Some of the more daring voyagers had pried up some of the
hold planking and found a huge store of canned goods in the
lower hold. As lookouts stood by to warn if guards approached,
they rifled those packing boxes and brought up cans of pineapple
and juices. Only a very little of this was shared and I felt
strong enough to try my hand one dark night. While two boys held
the heavy deck piece up a foot or so, I reached my long arm down
and fumbled for the largest can I could find. It was a gallon
size and my joy was immense. I carried it back through the
darkness to my shelf space and my bunky and I began cutting at
the lid with my mess knife. Once again, though, I was
disappointed. It was a can of lard. Even when you are starving,
a mouthful of unsalted lard tastes like a mouthful of unsalted
lard any other time. We tried it on rice and plain. We tried
trading it for other edibles and failed. In the end, we gave it
away as being too big a can to conceal during the regular
searches that took place.
We reached Davao on November 5, 1942, and dropped anchor in
the upper part of the Gulf of Davao. The green of the not
distant shoreline was a welcome sight. The heat though was
blistering. The flies found us as soon as we hove to and our day
before disembarking was miserable with scratching, slapping and
fighting those flies from eating our rice ration. They were the
big blue-bottle variety that insisted on staying right on your
spoon till you brushed them off as you popped the spoon into
your mouth.
As one of the sicker boys I was given consideration in the
unloading. I was last. While the others were herded off up the
road to the Davao Penal Colony, I was left under guard with half
a dozen in the small shack for the night. Our guards were jovial
fellows. They shared their rice with us and saw that we had
plenty of room to sleep. They even brought in a bucket of the
most delicious looking cherries I had ever seen. It was a wooden
cask bound around with a vine. The cherries were red and plump
and my mouth watered with anticipation. Again though, no luck.
They were salted cherries that are standard rations for Japanese
soldiers. They eat them to season their rice. I was beginning to
believe I was never going to taste anything but salted food
again.
The next morning trucks came for us and we were loaded
aboard for the 40 km trek to our new home. The road, a narrow,
rutted and rain-soaked track through the forest, held a promise
of hope. We were, for one thing, determined that this should be
a better camp than Cabanatuan. We knew from reports of those who

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had been there before the war that this camp had plantations of
coconut, coffee, avocado and vegetables. What we did not know
was that the Japanese would withhold all such from us on the
basis that these were luxuries. We knew that nothing could be
any worse than Cabanatuan which we had just left. We knew that
the trees, the adequate water supply and the fact that we had
lived in prison almost a year, were in our favor. And so we
approached Dapeco, a place where most of us learned to fight for
our lives again, where we began to laugh after nine months of
grimness, where we learned to have hope for the future. There
was something about that jungle prison that made me want to
live, to survive, yes and to return. With the solid, dense,
greenness of the jungle closing in on all sides, the blue sky
overhead and the palm trees dotting the compound, we had come to
a far better place than that treeless death camp, Cabanatuan.
Though we did not know it at the time, this was to be our home
for over 18 months. Some of those months were bitter and some
were gay.
CHAPTER VIII
DAVAO PENAL COLONY, MINDINAO
I will not approach this story of prison camp life at Davao
in chronological order. Incidents and occasions overlap. I begin
with the story of the night of our departure from Davao Penal
Colony on June 5, 1944, and try to bring the essence of the
story into focus.
I lay on a litter near the prison camp galley that lush,
tropical night in early June of 1944. It was a significant night
for me. It was a significant night for all of the 1,200 American
prisoners of war in that Japanese camp. We had been prisoners
for over two years, since April of 1942. For a year and a half,
Davao Penal Colony had been our home. Now, we were being moved
to a new location. There was only one reason for the Nips to
move us. Someone was putting the pressure on. The Yanks were
coming and they knew it. Mindanao might be next.
Dapeco, a contraction of the proper name, Davao Penal
Colony, was located some forty kilometers east of the port of
Davao at the innermost reaches of the gulf of the same name.
There were only two means of access to the camp. One was a treelined,
deep-rutted road that ran through the jungle. The other
was the river that alternately flooded and subsided with the
rains. The river landing was located some ten kilometers from
camp.
Davao had many advantages over the other prison camps we
had been in. There were trees--lots of trees. The campsite was

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one developed by the Philippine Commonwealth for its long term
prisoners. The barrack-like housing consisted of ten long
thatched buildings. Extending away from the center aisle of each
barracks was a sort of raised deck about 18 inches higher than
the floor. This was separated into compartments. There was room
for eight men in a compartment. Each man had a space seven feet
long by eighteen inches wide. That eighteen inches was a board
and a half as we called it--twelve inch boards being used for
the planking.
But it was not the housing, the trees, the isolation or the
food that made Davao a distinctive prison camp. These things
contributed probably and they certainly made the atmosphere more
bearable. The one outstanding feature of Davao was that there
men had quit dying. In every other camp we had been in, men died
at the rate of from 35 to 50 a day. Malaria, dysentery,
diphtheria and lack of sanitation along with starvation were
equal causes. At Davao, we had gone for over a year without a
death from any cause except executions.
The senior American officers of the camp were honest and
courageous men who were fair to officers and men alike. Men who
had not smiled for a long time had learned to laugh again at
Dapeco. Of course, it was no health resort. A year and a half of
prison is a long time anywhere. We had felt the pangs of
separation from our families, the pangs of hunger, and the pain
of disease. There were the regular attacks of malaria, the
disfiguring scars of cellulitis, a skin disease that lasted some
eight months. The rice was scanty at best and it always had a
weevil or two in every serving. The big difference at Dapeco was
still that men had quit dying. They had learned to have faith
once again and respect for each other.
This remarkable difference was not due to the Japanese.
They denied us the fruits and vegetables that grew outside the
prison wire. As captors go they were not unduly harsh either.
Our men were able to smuggle bananas, avocados, sweet potatoes
and some greens into camp from the work details.
Morale in the camp was not the work of any one man. It came
about from a number of causes. Men like Commander McCracken,
USN, Chaplain Brewster, also of the Navy, Lieutenant Colonel
Deeter of the Army Medical Corps, Captain Charlie Osborne,
another doctor, Father Le Fleur and Father Kennedy, Catholic
Army Chaplains, and a host of others all had a hand in the
process.
And then, too, there is that old wheeze that runs, "It
takes a heap of living to make a house a home." Well, we had
done a lot of living at Dapeco. We had come into that camp
starved, beaten, and sick. We had come from camps where water
was scarce, violence the rule of the day, and death a constant

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companion. At Dapeco, we had found a measure of stability. We
had water, dry quarters, green trees, and competent leadership.
We established a routine for our lives. For the first time since
our capture some nine months before, we were able to build a
social group. It was this unity of purpose, the semblance of
regularity and the ability to keep clean that turned Dapeco into
more than just a prison camp.
One inspired officer whipped together a choral group that
sang beautifully on that rice diet. Major Brown, a former
teacher, lectured on many subjects. One of his most wellremembered
was a series on the sayings of the wise King Solomon:
"There are many things in this world to confound the mind of
man. There is the way of the eagle in the air; the way of the
serpent on the rock; the way of the ship upon the sea; and
lastly, but most confounding of all, the way of a man with a
maid." Major Brown made these lessons live for us with an
eloquence and enthusiasm that still lingers. There were others
who set up camp shows. Men were invited to participate. I
recited "Casey at the Bat," "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and
Kiplings's "The Women."
It was at these shows, held whenever the Japanese would
permit, that we got a glimpse of a small American flag that one
of the boys had sewn between the folds of a blanket. No man who
has been denied a sight of his own flag for long will forget a
glimpse of the one symbol that represented home, family and
eventual rescue which that flag gave to each of us.
I am rattling about all over Dapeco in a most disjointed
fashion. In the first place, as I have told you, it was a camp
in the middle of the jungle. There were two main cleared areas.
One was the actual camp site. The other was the rice fields.
There were some 400 hectares (a hectare equals 2.2 acres) in all
of the cleared land. It was the sort of jungle country one had
to constantly fight. First the vines would creep out. Then small
bushes would spring up. Trees would seem to pop up almost
overnight. The grass got long and before you knew it, the jungle
was closing in around you. When we first came to camp in
November of 1942, the Nips sought out an easy source of stakes
for a barbed wire enclosure. A grove of kapok trees seemed
ideally suited for the purpose. The trees were about eighteen
inches in diameter. They were straight and clean of branches for
about twelve feet. The grove of over 1,000 trees was cut. One
end of the long trunk was pointed with an axe and the other end
was sunk into the ground. All of this work was done by
prisoners, of course. The 1,000 logs were used to make three
separate concentric rings around the prison compound. Barbed
wire was strung on the posts and the middle fence was
electrified.

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Within a month, a few of the posts rotted off. The rest of
them took root and grew. The rotten ones were replaced and the
rest formed a living tree ring around the prison compound. The
fertility of the soil, the heavy rainfall, and the warm humid
air all made for rapid growth. The rainfall itself, which might
run up to 200 inches a year, was fairly constant through the
twelve months. Atone time, there was a three day dry spell and
everyone was running around with his tongue hanging out. During
the day the weather might be bright and clear. Along toward
evening the clouds would bank up and the rain would begin. There
was rain during the day, too. You could hear it coming across
the jungle in a swelling roar. At the sound, the boys would leap
from their tasks, grab their blankets and clothes from the
bushes where they had been put to air or dry. The rain would hit
as though a fire hose had been turned on and continue for
upwards of an hour. Then as quickly as it came, the clouds broke
up, the sun shone, and the air was beautiful and clean. Small
wisps of steam rose from the ground and the gurgle of water
sounded as the drainage ditches carried off the excess. I was
working with a group on the edge of the jungle during one of
these drenchers. Pig runs crisscrossed in every direction. The
tree covering overhead was so dense you could not see the sky.
Inside of ten minutes from the beginning of the rain, the pig
runs were six inches deep and flowing rapidly. I was told these
runs were made by wild pigs, and though I never saw one during
my short tour with this type of working party, I imagine it is
accurate.
There were large snakes in thatjung1e too. At intervals,
the boys out on working parties would tell of seeing them. One
Filipino guide told us he had come upon a big anaconda in the
path one time with a half-digested pig stretching his huge
mouth. He killed the dormant snake and got pig and snake for his
family to eat. The boys who worked in the rice fields told often
of coming upon cobras. The cobra, it seems, has his poison fangs
in the back of his mouth and any small piece of clothing will
ordinarily protect against a fatal bite. I only know we never
suffered a casualty from cobra bite though our boys had to work
mostly naked in the rice fields.
Our ration at Dapeco was mostly rice. At first we were fed
three times a day, a total of about a pound of rice. Then, with
a reduction in the ration, we were fed only two meals. For a
time we could supplement our diet with smuggled bananas and
vegetables. On one occasion, I bought a stalk of green bananas
from a Filipino for one peso. There were still a few Filipino
families living in camp. On another occasion, I traded a can of
corned beef for 100 small bananas. This last deal, which I
pondered for several days before I made up my mind, was given to

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me I am sure because of my poor physical condition. A can of
corned beef was a pound of meat and a very valuable item. Those
100 bananas were a delicious treat, though, and probably
contained just what my scurvy-sore mouth needed.
This brings up the subject of other treats that came our
way at infrequent intervals. The Japanese permitted fried
bananas to be brought in on several occasions. They were
evidently made by native women in the vicinity for they were
still hot. To me, they were one of the most tantalizing
mouthfuls since I had tasted a mango over a year before. The
bananas were cut lengthwise several times and fried in hot
coconut oil. Sometimes we got them made up in crisscrossed
batches and sometimes they came in fried whole. I suppose in the
year and a half we got half a dozen issues. Of course, they had
to be paid for. That brings up another subject. How did we get
the money to pay for these issues and the issues of tobacco?
A few months after we came to Dapeco, the Nips announced we
were no longer captives. Our status had been changed to prisoner
of war. This designation of "captive" and "prisoner of war” is
not just an exercise in semantics. For almost a whole year the
Japanese had not bothered to list us as anything more than so
many bodies. As captives, we had no rights. As prisoners of war,
we were entitled to privileges recognized throughout the world
by civilized countries. While Japan was not a signatory of the
Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war, they had indicated
they would abide by most of that document's provisions. The
important sections of that agreement to us concerned food,
medical attention, and individual rights.
The very infrequent pay days the Japanese gave us were only
a token of their recognition of the Geneva Convention. It was
purely lip service to a concern not highly prized in Asian
culture. Prisoners did not deserve treatment as human beings.
This payment, then, was one of the few concessions the Japanese
made to the Geneva Convention.
Field grade officers were to get 50 to 60 pesos and the
company grade officers, of which I was one, 30 pesos. Sometime
later when payment was actually started, we duly signed the pay
voucher and were handed over our money in occupation currency.
It was good only in camp and there was nothing to buy. Soon
afterward, however, the bananas and tobacco began to arrive. The
tobacco came in the form of “hands.” A hand consisted of 100
leaves. It was moth eaten and strong. It had lain in some
warehouse a long, long time. It could be smoked, though, and it
was welcome as the flowers in May.
It was in the distribution of these infrequent bonanzas
that the genius for leadership in the camp came out. It seems
like a simple matter to say that the bananas and tobacco were

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distributed. In a camp where no one has much of anything, the
least morsel of something is important. To get the stuff out so
that every man would get just shares was a major feat of
distribution. In the case of the tobacco, we drew lots out of a
hat. The man who drew number one got first choice in his group.
The man who had number two came next and so on down the line.
There were good hands of leaf and poor ones. Some were weak and
some were strong. They traded back and forth for blending
purposes. Those who did not smoke traded theirs for food or
other items they wanted. The important thing is that every man
got his just share. We made a gala affair out of the drawing.
The good leaves could be rolled into cigars. Most of us shredded
ours and rolled them into cigarettes. The supply of paper was
critical. On one occasion Protestant Chaplain Brewster gave me a
small Bible saying, “Read it, then smoke it." Some of the boys
brought in paper torn from cement sacks pilfered on the work
details. A small roll of toilet paper made a suitable substitute
for me for a long time.
The really big "give-away" show of our first year at Dapeco
came early in February after only a couple of months in camp.
This was the arrival and distribution of Red Cross packages. We
had heard rumors of such a distribution for months. Now it was a
reality. It was the first indication that anyone was even
thinking of us. We knew it came all the way from that magic
place--the good old U.S.A.
There was, in all, about thirty pounds per man. There was
also some small issue of clothing. It was that American food
that turned that week into Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New
Year's Day all in one. More than the shot in the arm the food
gave us was the stimulation to our morale. It was not long
before everything had a price on it. The unit of exchange was
the almighty cigarette. A can of corned beef was valued at five
packs of good cigarettes. The cigarettes in the gift boxes were
not in bad shape. They had been exposed to a long ocean trip,
though, and some of them were a bit mouldy. A mouldy cigarette
is rough on the throat. It cuts like a new file. Some men
harbored their store of food. Some gobbled it up inside of a few
days. Each man enjoyed his in his own way. Some of us pooled our
resources and stretched it out by enjoying a portion of a can of
food at a time. There was surprisingly little dissension over
the food. There were incidents of thievery and these were sad. A
man who had saved his food would come in from a work party and
find his gear rifled. It was more than sad, it was tragic. That
was also an incentive for the rest of us to at least get the
benefit of ours by eating it.
The packages contained a few cans of corned beef, some bar
chocolate, soluble coffee, a butter-like cheese in cans, half a

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pound of cheddar cheese, powdered milk, cigarettes and canned
puddings. From that day on life in a Japanese prison camp took
on new meaning. We knew more than ever that the Yanks would one
day come and blast these little, yellow men off their high and
mighty seats. We would be hard to kill from this point on. The
grass was green, the rice tasted better and the hope that
springs eternal was strong within us.
Dapeco Hospital
During all this time, I was in the hospital at Dapeco.
Almost from November, 1942, when we first came into camp, I had
been a patient. During those first few months, I really hit
bottom. There wasn't much fight left in me. The story of that
decline will come in another part of this account. My eyesight,
by this time, was very poor. My legs had developed an ataxia
that prevented me from walking well. My mouth was sore from
scurvy. I was weak all over. The slightest exertion was an
extreme effort. One saving grace, or so it appears now, is that
I was constipated. While most of the men had diarrhea or
dysentery, I had not had a bowel movement during the fifteen
days of our trip to Davao. The doctors laughed at me when I told
them this odd bit of news. They arranged however, to have one of
the corpsmen give me an enema.
And so, as I say, I was in the hospital. That is, we called
it a hospital. There were no quiet corridors, no antiseptically
clean walls and rooms. There was no elaborate equipment to
indicate this was a house of healing. There were no white
uniformed nurses or clean linen. The American doctors, in an
attempt to maintain their dignity, wore shorts instead of "G”
strings as did most everyone else. The remarkable thing about
this hospital is that it did the job that hospitals are supposed
to do--it kept men alive.
Dapeco was malaria country. Soon after our arrival, cases
of chills and fever began to pop up. I had my first attack just
before Christmas, 1942. It was a lulu, too. I remember urinating
from the edge of my bamboo cot into a tin can. The fever was so
high after a five hour chill, it seemed I could hardly hold the
can it was so hot with the liquid I had just voided. But this
hospital did a grand job. I may have mentioned Lieutenant
Colonel Dwight Deeter before. He was surgeon, head of the unit.
The main building was about 75 feet long. It had been painted at
one time. There was a narrow porch running most of the way
around the outside. Inside a corrugated iron roof covered a bare
and at one time whitewashed room. The cots and beds were lined
up on either side with an aisle down the center. I believe it
held from 50 to 60 patients. There were a few other buildings in

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the hospital area and more about them later. The patients had
more room here than was allowed them in the barracks a few
hundred feet away. Still the crude bunks were jammed almost up
against one another. The porches were filled too. Some of the
bunks were bamboo. Some were canvas cots. Others were left over
from the former prison camp hospital and were constructed of
native lumber, with which the Davao forest abounded.
The American doctors did a fine job at Davao. They were
medics captured along with the rest of us on Bataan, Corregidor
and in the Visayan Islands. Many charges have been leveled at
them for misappropriation of drugs, misuse of drugs, outright
trading of drugs to the Japanese in return for extra food. I do
not know whether these charges are true. I only know they
established a record in that hospital that many modern hospitals
would like to equal. In a camp of 2,000 men, with a 96 per cent
incidence of malaria, hundreds of other diseases, and a
starvation diet for all hands, they did not have a death from
any cause for over a year. A few men died soon after our arrival
from Luzon. Many were close to death. Whether it was the will to
live, the atmosphere of hope, or the treatment and medication
will never be known. The men of Dapeco just refused to die.
I saw one man on the verge of death. He was literally skin
and bones. It was inconceivable to me he could live out the
night. The doctors said the same thing. As a last resort, they
decided to operate. It had to be an abdominal exploratory.
Inside, they found a series of seven abdominal abscesses. They
drained them, left tubes from the wounds hanging outside, sewed
him up. With nothing much more than the prayers of his buddies
and the hopes of the doctors to go on, that man fought his way
back to virile good health in a matter of six months. When I
asked Charlie Osborne and Major Davis how they had performed
this miracle, they just shook their heads and said, "All we did
was to help God make that man whole again."
There were other doctors. Major Schwarz, Captain Whitely,
and Major Ruth were only a few that come to mind. Their supply
of medicines was meager. Their application must have been
profound. They were faced with grave decisions. For instance, in
the case of vitamin B1, the hospital had received a small supply
of this specific for beri-beri. Should the doctors give a heavy
dosage to the thirty-odd seriously ill men or share it among the
many incipient cases? In the one case they might pull those few
men through and they might not. Vitamin B was a specific, but
without food as a supplement, it might not bring about the
results. If they spread the use of the drug over a greater
number of men, those thirty seriously ill cases might die any
time. The decision was the only one they could make--give all
beri-beri cases a light injection. There were complaints by some

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men that this cost them their eyesight. A major dose of the
serum might have given them the lift they needed to regain it. I
do not profess to know the right answer. I only know that I will
string along with the decision as the best one for the greatest
number of men. It may have cost me my eyesight but I still have
my life.
It was not only the doctors at Dapeco that made that
hospital effective. There was Joe Garcia of a little hamlet,
Socorro, New Mexico. Joe was the ever-smiling night man on duty
seven nights a week for almost a year and a half. No request was
ever so big as to wipe that smile from Joe's face.
There was Irving Beatty, who came right out of a men's
dancing group when he was drafted into the army. As a medic on
Bataan, he had been following a ravine, looking for wounded when
he came upon two Japanese soldiers in the process of bayoneting
three wounded Filipino officers. Equipped only with his Red
Cross band, Beatty charged the Nips, arms waving and screaming
at the top of his lungs. The Nips fled in abject terror at such
tactics. The medic was able to save the lives of two of the
three officers. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for
his afternoon's work.
There was a boy from Boston by name of Jim Kitridge. When
Dr. Davis decided the only chance of saving one man's life was
surgery, the plans were laid. An order was left for the night
attendant to give the stricken man six Nembutal about midnight.
Something went wrong with the recording of those six Nembutal
though. They were not listed as being given. Kitridge, the day
medical corpsman, saw the order when he came on duty at 6 A.M.,
and gave another six Nembutal without checking.
There was an atmosphere of grave concern as the news spread
that a mistake had been made. Each of us had a stake in that
sick man's life. Each of us felt partly responsible. Each of us
wanted that man to live. Our doctors had kept us alive and we
wanted them to keep him alive. There was no cold impersonality
about this hospital. We all prayed and sent out all the strength
we could muster. And the man did live.
There were others but their names are hazy. Although some
of the corpsmen were not fitted for their job, some of them rose
to great heights of self-sacrifice. It is hard to tend another's
wants when the chances are that he might live and you might die.
You are expending energy and he is conserving his.
A few months after we had come to Dapeco, the more serious
cases among us were transferred to a smaller ward. It was a
squarish building out in the rear of the main hospital. It was
surrounded by trees, and there were hibiscus bushes along the
paths. It was cool and comfortable. We came to call this the
death house. The doctors had decided that these were the

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patients most likely to die. By separating them from the rest,
that melancholy event could be minimized to a degree. Also, any
small extra portions of food available could be given to these
25 men without the others seeing the operation. The death house
fooled the doctors again. One by one, these wobbly creatures
rose from their sick beds and walked again. Some of them were
paralyzed to the extent they could not even turn over. Some had
to be hand fed for months. Some lay like inert skeletons day
after day, muttering or screaming at intervals. Many of those
were killed later from other causes, but they refused to die at
Dapeco.
Then there was the pest house. This was a small building,
separated from the rest by a fence. The surrounding area was
grassy. A grove of coconut palms shaded it from the sun. It was
crowded with contagious cases. There was some amoebic dysentery,
just what other ailments I do not recall. It was here, also,
that the lock section was located for the mentally ill. There
were probably four or five of these. In some cases, it was
temporary and in some cases there seemed no improvement over the
whole year and a half we were at Dapeco. As time went by and I
could be out, I used to go out and visit with the boys in the
pest house. We would sit under the palm trees and tell of our
experiences. It was a pleasantly cool place. I well remember one
day, as we sat, the sudden shock of an earthquake. It was the
most violent one I had ever experienced. The palms seemed to
sway till their fronds touched the ground. Knowing it to be as
safe a place as any, none of us even moved. In a few moments, it
passed with no damage.
One of the most bothersome pests to invade our jungle
prison was the bedbugs. They were brought in with a shipment of
mosquito bars. Even the bedbugs we could endure for the comfort
of a mosquito bar, though. Each night before we lay down for the
night, we would go over the corners and seams of our blankets
and bars, hunting for the smelly little pests. A bedbug can go
hungry for an inconceivably long time. He gets more agile with
hunger, too. We had little ones and big ones. There were fat
ones and thin ones. Each of us learned to detest the rancid odor
of the pesky things when they were squashed between the nail and
forefinger. That was the surest way to get them, it seemed.
Periodically, we could pour hot water over the joints and
crevices in the bunks. This would do little more than keep them
under control. They seemed to come right back in numbers within
a few days.
At intervals also, I would get a friend or a corpsman to
take my thin, kapok mattress out for a sunning. The best
solution, or at least control method, was to find an ant hill
and lay the blanket or mattress over the top of it. The ants

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made an effective cleaning agent. They ate any crumbs of rice
that might have been dropped and relentlessly hunted the bedbugs
down. Some of the boys saved a few crumbs of our twice weekly
spoon of sugar and coaxed the ants in to scavenge their bunks,
too. The ants were easy to get rid of in the evening. During the
day, they trooped around the edge of the bunk seeking out
bedbugs in all the crevices.
The bedpan, as in all hospitals, was the most diabolical
contrivance we bed patients had to contend with. For those who
were able to move at all, the doctors had devised a makeshift
one-holer out on the porch. It had a seat and underneath was a
five-gallon can. It seemed impossible to keep this useful
article clear of bedbug. Every three or four days, I would make
a trip on the shoulders of two corpsmen to the "head." Our low
residue diet made frequent trips unnecessary unless we suffered
from diarrhea or dysentery. After a minute sitting on the
throne, I felt the bedbugs begin their nibbling. It was not a
pleasant wait, especially when one's legs were useless in
getting away till help arrived. On one occasion, I almost made
it back to bed by myself. A very large and hungry cockroach came
up and took a healthy bite out of a very tender part of me. One
of the doctors, in laughing with me over the incident, indicated
he was going to prescribe the treatment every day on the basis
that it might teach me to walk again.
We had few other pests or pets. A few cats strayed into the
compound, but they disappeared very suddenly. No one knew
exactly whose stew they went into but that was the assumption.
The Japs tethered some of the work buffalo in the compound to
keep the grass down. The boys would save a bit of their salt
ration and let the carabao lick their salty hands on occasion.
The animals could remember each of the individuals who had been
so kind and would stick their noses in the air with an expectant
look each time that man passed.
The rice ration for the hospital was cooked in a small
galley in the rear of the main building. Large metal cowas held
the rice over bricked up fireboxes. A soup of greens gathered
along the canals supplemented the diet. At times, we also had
casava root or camotes (sweet potatoes). These last we called
"The Purple Death" because of their bright lavender color. We
usually got two to four ounces of salt fish a couple of times a
week. Our rice ration varied as time went on. During the first
year of imprisonment, we averaged almost a pound and a half a
day. Later we were cut to eight and ten ounces. During the last
eight months, things got pretty tight on the supply system, and
the rice ration dropped to just six ounces a day.
Those who worked in the rice fields at Dapeco got a bigger
ration. Those who worked around camp or close in got a somewhat

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smaller one. Those of us in the hospital got the least of all.
This was quite consistent thinking on the part of the Japanese.
Little work, little need for food.
At Dapeco, the rice field workers raised almost enough to
feed the camp. It was a laborious process to plant the
seedlings, transplant them, weed the paddies and plow the turgid
waters of those paddies. There was a well equipped rice mill on
the grounds of the main camp. For some time, we ate polished
rice--that is, rice that had been run through a process to remove
the outside and inner husk. The inner husk of the rice
contains a high degree of vitamin B, essential to good health.
In the Orient, where rice is more-or-less a staple of the diet,
this inner husk is removed in the better grades of rice. Like
people on a wheat economy eating white bread, the Orientals
liked their rice polished, even if less healthful.
This polishing process was accomplished by running the rice
through a finely set stone wheel that stripped off the inner
husk. A very short time after, we began milling our own rice at
Dapeco, some enlightened individual, in some unknown manner and
without the Japanese suspecting, damaged the rice polishing
wheel beyond repair.
The Japanese were furious. There was much storming and
cursing. Dire threats were passed out and punishment was
promised. Nothing, as far as I know, did occur except that from
that time on, we got unpolished rice. From that time on, too,
the incidence of beri-beri declined.
Our Captors
I have not said much about our Japanese captors so far. It
might be well to have a look at them. They were very much in
evidence. Each morning and evening they would come in for
"bango" or count. The able-bodied lined up outside. For a time,
even the bed patients had to count in Japanese. Later, the Nips
gave that up and did the counting themselves. The name of the
Japanese noncom who took the count was, as I remember, Mucho
Goochi. He was a stocky, severe, little man. Usually the
civilian interpreter, Mr. Wada, came with him to note the
figures down. I know very little about either of these
characters but Goochi came near to slapping me one time for a
mistake in counting. He did slap a major in the formation out
front one day. Colonel Deeter gave him a tongue lashing for the
act, too, and reported the incident to the Jap commander. There
were not many overt acts of punishment of this sort at Dapeco. I
will relate other forms of punishment later.
As for Mr. Wada, he was a short, bentbacked, little Nip
with a most unpleasant face. I never heard of him actually

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meting out any physical punishment. Mr. Wada was the civilian
interpreter for the Japanese Army at Dapeco. A short,
bentbacked, little man who peered grotesquely through his thick
lensed glasses, he had all the aspects of sinister doings. I
suppose it was his twisted back and his hunched, peering posture
that encouraged the distrust and dislike of the Americans more
than any real act on his part.
It was Mr. Wada who transmitted the verbal orders of the
Japanese commander to the American commander. He also delivered
the verbal replies. His peculiar brand of the English language,
learned during his stay in California, must have garbled many of
these messages for they sometimes resulted in punishment and
withholding of privileges. Mr. Wada had no reason to like
Americans and he said so. During his stay in California, he had
come into contact with the law and been placed in a state mental
institution for a time. I never had very close contacts with Mr.
Wada, but I well remember that in early June, 1944, the move to
another location being imminent, Mr. Wada had to dispose of the
rabbits he had been raising as pets. He could not bear the
thought of killing and eating the animals and turned them over
to the prison hospital for the sicker men. I have always felt
that Mr. Wada could not have been all bad.
There were incidents of sheer, Oriental cruelty though. I
saw several and will relate one. One day in April, 1944, a small
group of us were sent, under guard, to a meadow close by the
edge of the jungle. The guard instructed us, by sign and Pidgin
English, to dig up the sod in squares and build an earth
rivetment for a machine gun. Many of the boys in camp had picked
up enough Japanese language to understand the instructions of
the various guards. So we began the work. About this time, a
small puppy came leaping and bounding up to the group. The Nip
guard, sitting in the shade of a water tower close by, shifted
his gun to his left arm and cuffed the dog away. The pup, liking
the rough play, bounded back for more. He was cuffed again. Then
the guard began to pick the dog up by first one leg and then the
other. Then he picked the pup up by the neck and tossed him
away. The next time the pup came back to him, he took off the
quarter inch rope all Nip soldiers wore as part of their field
equipment and fashioned a noose on one end. This he placed
around the dog's neck. He hung the pup by the neck up over a
girder of the tower. There were faint yelpings and squirmings.
These finally subsided. The guard took the dog down and poured
water from his canteen over its head. After a few minutes, the
dog revived enough to stagger around a bit. The guard then hung
him up again till he hung limp. This whole revolting process was
repeated time and time again till the dog finally failed to come
back to life. The Nip then rolled his rope neatly and placed it

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back on his belt and calmly watched us finish the morning's
work. Each of us prisoners would gladly have throttled that Nip
with our bare hands had there been an opportunity.
By and large, Dapeco was a good camp as far as physical
punishment was concerned. One man was shot and killed by a guard
for a minor infraction. He was working outside the wire and
threw a canteen over the fence to a fellow prisoner for
refilling. The guard shot him through the head. On another
occasion, Blackie Grossman was digging sweet potatoes closer
than the five meter limit to the wire and was shot at by the
sentry in the tower. Blackie was not hit but was taken over to
the Jap headquarters for questioning. When the camp commander
asked him if he was trying to escape, Blackie said, "Hell no.
When my government wants me out of this place, they will come
and get me out." Blackie also told the camp commander that if we
got enough to eat, we wouldn't be grubbing in the dirt for a few
lousy camotes. The camp commander just smiled and sent Blackie
back to duty.
There were many instances of violence on both sides during
the years of our imprisonment. On one occasion at Dapeco, an
American major, working under armed guard in one of the Japanese
bodegas or work sheds, suddenly grabbed the nodding guard's
rifle. He aimed the gun at the Nip and pulled the trigger. The
gun was not loaded and only clicked. The major grabbed an iron
bar and hit the Nip and fled with the empty rifle. He ran
screaming into the prison compound, the Nip in pursuit.
The Japanese sent a squad of soldiers into camp to capture
the major. His death, officially explained as resulting from the
struggle of his capture, was announced within a couple of days.
We, who saw the capture, knew the major had suffered no
appreciable wounds in that quiet process. It is very likely he
was beaten to death during the short imprisonment in the
Japanese guardhouse.
There was other violence in connection with some of the
escapes from Dapeco. We had about twenty men actually get away
during the year and a half we were there. They got away in three
groups. I relate the events as I heard about them. It is hard to
recount these facts fully or accurately because of methods of
suppression taken by the Nips.
During the first quarter of 1942, immediately after our
arrival at Dapeco, the Nips seemed not to have a fixed policy on
the treatment of the prisoners. They were alternately tough and
lenient. The probable reason is that they were new at the
business of administering this sort of group. One thousand of us
were from prison camps on the Island of Luzon. We had been
captured on Bataan and Corregidor. We were a sad and melancholy
lot. We had come through starvation on Bataan and been subjected

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to disease and extreme hardship during the eight months of Camp
O'Donnell and Cabanatuan. We had been used to seeing men die at
the rate of fifty a day at those camps. We had almost come to
expect death. The other thousand prisoners at Dapeco were
soldiers captured in the Visayan Islands and in other parts of
the Philippines. They had seen little fighting as such. They
were well-fed and had been treated with some degree of
consideration after their capture. During the first days of
imprisonment of this latter group, meat was a daily diet. They
organized athletic teams. Their camp organization was left
pretty well intact. They preceded us into Dapeco by a week or so
and had the camp well-cleaned and organized for our arrival.
It was a shock to us emaciated, disease-ridden men of
Bataan and Corregidor, to realize the depths to which we had
sunk. The healthy appearance of the group captured on Mindanao
came as a complete surprise. We hadn't realized the gradual
degeneration of our group. These healthy men gave us a
tremendous lift. They had a hospital ready to receive the worst
cases. They were able to scavenge food. They had maintained
standards we had long since abandoned. Standards of cleanliness,
that is, and dress. They were able to haul the wood, draw the
water, and do the cooking while we recouped our strength.
During this period, too, those work details functioning
around the perimeter of camp were allowed to go outside the wire
with only nominal supervision. The details that brought wood for
the camp galley, the work parties, at the jute mill, grasscutting
details along the roads were not guarded by armed men.
At the jute mill, prisoners fashioned rope out of the fibrous
leaves of the abaca-plant. The plant was almost
indistinguishable from the banana plant that abounded in the
area. The leaves were dried, shredded and made into switches
much like those employed by women who supplement their hair.
These were intertwined in the strands of rope as they were
twisted.
But, to get back to the work parties. One small detail
worked in the edges of the surrounding jungle. They gathered
palm fronds for thatching roofs. Another maintained the coffee
plantation. It was of this last detail that I shall speak more
fully.
Escapes
The coffee detail was a permanent group of about eight men.
They worked seven days a week. They weeded, cultivated, and
otherwise cared for the large coffee field. While seven of the
men worked, one was assigned to rustle extra food and prepare
the noonday meal. He would slip off into other fields and gather

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avocados, Star apples, camotes, and other food to supplement the
rice. The men worked hard but they prospered on the added diet.
They were able at times to sneak into the chicken yard and filch
eggs. They could at times smuggle extra food into camp. It was
inevitable that they should begin to formulate plans for an
escape. When the American Red Cross food was issued, they saved
their canned meats and other durable foods. They either traded
for or bought medicines with other food. They made caches of
this food and medicine near the edge of the jungle. The
membership of this group was hand picked. Its leadership was
good. The only member with whom I actually had any contact was
Captain Ed Dies of the Army Air Force. I remember one time when
I was visiting a friend up on Bataan airstrip during the
campaign, he came running into the operations tent by the edge
of the field and said hurriedly, "Put the big shoes on Suzy."
That meant to place the 500-pound bomb on his P40 for a
prearranged attack on a Japanese cruiser that had just pulled
into Subic Bay. We had built a retractable bomb hangar for the
overload 90 the ship could launch the bomb below the propeller
arc. It was more of a load than the P40 should carry but Dies
had much enthusiasm for the project. He and another pilot took
off on the mission. Dies delivered his load squarely amidship of
the cruiser, but the other pilot was lost when his bomb either
fouled in the prop or he was shot down. We heard that the
cruiser was sunk but I have no way of knowing.
At any rate, the personnel of the coffee detail was well
chosen. They had a compass. They had a navigator. They planned
routes and emergency programs. They had set a Sunday, when most
work parties were kept in camp, as the day. They simply marched
off to work that clear Sabbath morning and were not missed till
they failed to return in the evening.
The story of how they fought their way through the jungle
to the arms of the Philippine Guerrillas and eventually home is
told in their own account. It made quite a splash in the
magazines of the day as it was the first real word of what the
captured Americans were going through. It was the first leakage
of the atrocities committed by the Japanese on the March out of
Bataan.
This was a well-planned and highly successful escape. The
rest of us knew it would mean punishment but there was little
resentment. Some cursed the men who spoiled the comfort we had
attained at Dapeco. The older heads realized that it is the duty
of a soldier to keep on fighting whenever the opportunity
arises. These men would have been derelict in their duty had
they failed to take advantage of the escape possibilities.
As I have said, the men of this detail were capable. They
had planned their escape with some precision. A compass was a

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necessity as was a navigator. Their course lay through a dense
jungle and, though they might meet friendly natives or
guerrillas who would guide them, they had no assurance of these
facts. Their original escape date was s e t as March 28, 1943.
The opportunity did not present itself and their r plans were
changed to April 4.
Those taking part in the escape included Lieutenant
Commander McCoy of the U. S. Navy, Lieutenant Colonel Melnic of
the Marines, Captains Dies and Shafner, First Lieutenants Jack
Hawkins and Mike Dobervick and Second Lieutenant Grashio and
Bollens along with Sergeants R. B. Spellman and Paul Marshall.
Accompanying the Americans were two Filipinos, Beningno de la
Cruz and Victorio Jumarennz.
It was this escape group that brought out word of what had
happened to over 22,000 Americans on Bataan and Corregidor.
There had been escapes before; there had been soldiers, sailors
and marines alike who had gotten into the hills. Some of these
groups had made successful contact with American forces. Most of
those who got into the hills soon were recaptured or destroyed
themselves through lack of organization or disunity. The
Japanese hunted them down relentlessly and any Filipino family
or barrio found protecting Americans was obliterated. Food was
hard to come by and oil to keep guns in working condition was
unobtainable. The greatest hazard was the ceaseless running to
escape detection and capture. In the end, most of those who got
into the hills were either captured or killed in fire fights
with Japanese.
Repercussions from the first Davao break were immediate.
Many of our officers were interrogated at length after the
coffee detail escape. The men in the barracks where the escapees
had lived were moved to other, more closely guarded quarters.
Most importantly, our rice ration was cut and that cut was never
restored during the next two years. We were denied the privilege
of any assembly, church or other function that would bring many
men together. Guards were put on all work parties. Security
regulations were generally tightened. The work was increased.
The next escape took place some time later when two men
slipped away from the rice fields where they were working under
guard. The rice fields, located some ten or twelve kilometers
from the main camp, were reached by a railroad. The men were
transported there each morning and back each night. The only
detail that came to me about this second escape is that the two
men slipped into the river, swam across and hit off into the
jungle. I heard later that one of them made it. The other died
in the jungle.
By this time in our prison camp life, there was evidence
that Dapeco was being watched closely by friendly eyes from the

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jungle's edge. The only overt act I ever heard of being made by
these guerrilla spies, who reported almost daily to their wellorganized
headquarters, was to leave some medicines in a cache
at the rice fields. The medicines were confiscated by the Nips
when an American was discovered uncovering them.
We learned later that plans for attacking the camp with a
view to releasing the prisoners were abandoned after it was
realized that it would be almost impossible to move all the sick
men through the thick jungle and that to leave them to the Japs
would mean sure death for the bedridden creatures. It gave us
great comfort to know our activities were being watched, though
we realized the small chance of rescue.
The most spectacular escape came after we had been at
Dapeco almost a year. It, like the first one, was a well-planned
affair. Its personnel were operating under greater restrictions.
They were under armed guard all the time. The guards, however,
tended to laxity at times. As time went on, the men were allowed
to work farther and farther away from the sentry. The men
comprising this group did not measure up to the caliber of the
men in the group that first escaped. They were more adventurous
and less the coldly planning type. At any rate, they prepared
well. They had caches of food, clothing and medicines in the
jungle. They had agreed to separate immediately upon the break
and head north toward the hills and the supposed guerrilla
hideout.
News of the break leaked, somehow, to the senior American
officers in camp. The counseled caution and even threatened to
disclose the fact that there was an imminent break to the
Japanese commander. The break was delayed for several weeks by
weather and disunity among the members of the party.
The first indication of trouble came to us in the hospital
in the form of sporadic rifle fire from an obscure area south of
camp. Some of the boys rushed out to the hospital porch in time
to see a squad of battle-ready Nips run out of the guardhouse
and head for the noise. Soon there was more firing and the heavy
thump of grenades exploding. Not long after this a Japanese
soldier, blood streaming down his face from a scalp wound, was
led back along the road toward the Japanese headquarters
building.
That was about all we knew about the escape for a long
time. All work groups were brought into the prison compound
immediately. All, that is, with the exception of the escapee
group and one detail of seven men working close by the scene of
action. This group was rounded up and locked in the Japanese
guardhouse. The rest of us were alerted to stand by for a count.
Mr. Wada intimated the seriousness of the shots when, as he took

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the count, he said, "I do not wish to have anything to do with
you. You are murder men."
We were kept strictly inside the wire for the next week or
so. Two days after the escape, the body of an American was
brought into camp. I cannot remember whether any American doctor
was allowed to identify it or not. We heard the man's name was
Boone. He had, supposedly, been shot during the melee.
The group of seven men working close by the group that made
the break was kept locked up in the Japanese guardhouse for
several weeks. Finally, on the word of the American officers and
the threat of death to the seven if they told the story, the men
were returned to camp. They had been subjected to questioning
and very meager rations during their stay in the “Chez Bodega"
as we called the guardhouse. It was not till years later that I
learned some of the details of the escape from one of the
participants.
I was in a hospital in Fort Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma,
when I was approached by a figure in pajamas and bathrobe. He
was obviously a patient. I raised up from my resting position
and called out immediately, “Watson, how did you happen to get
inhere?"
Watson told me a story almost as bizarre as his escape from
Dapeco two years before. (He had been married since his return
and resumption of rank of master sergeant in an infantry unit.
He and his wife got into an argument one night. Some damaging
allegations were made on both sides. Watson laid his service
pistol on the table and told his wife if she felt "that way" she
ought to shoot him. She did. Watson was taken to the hospital
and his wife to jail. Now he was up and about trying to raise
money to bail out his spouse.)
Watson told me of the events leading up to the escape at
Dapeco, also. Plans were all set for the day in question. Each
man was ready to take advantage of the first chance. One of the
Jap guards took Watson a short way into the jungle about midmorning
to chop down a banana tree with this shovel. Watson
knocked the tree over and stood by as the Nip leaned over to
gather in the stalk of fruit. At that time, Watson raised his
shovel and struck the guard across the shoulder. The guard had
seen the blow coming and deflected the blow from his head. On
the next swing, Watson got in a square head blow and grabbed the
gun, running to the edge of the clearing where another Nip guard
was trying to see the noisy happenings in the undergrowth and
keep his other charges under control. Watson came out shooting.
He felled the other guard and men scattered as they planned.
Just where Boone was shot and by whom is a mystery. One other
man of the group failed to get through to the hills, but Watson
said that inside of twenty-four hours he was with a group of

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friendly natives. They led him to the mountain hideout of the
organized forces on Mindanao. He stayed with this group until
the other escapees were brought in. These men were able to bring
the guerrillas up to date on the camp and furnish other
information of value to the Filipinos. This group was being
supplied by American submarines with modern weapons and
ammunition. Watson and the other ex-prisoners stayed in the
hills of Mindanao for some time, leading expeditions to spy on
various parts of the prison camp.
This very briefly is the story of the prison breaks. I
heard about them in snatches of conversation, from various
sources at other times. I cannot say the facts are accurate in
detail. This is what I believe to be the general outline.
Likewise in this account, I do not intend to condemn or excuse
the Japanese for their actions. Passing judgment is not my
purpose here. The Nips were not easy jailors. By the same token,
the Americans were not docile prisoners. That is the very nature
of war. It can be said the Japanese were unduly harsh when, for
instance, they formed the Americans into "security groups" at
Cabanatuan. If one man of the ten in any one group escaped, the
others, according to the rules, were to be shot in reprisal. It
was also evident that when the Nips showed any leniency with the
Americans, trouble was afoot and soon.
The Japs, operating under an economy of scarcity, in an
area of the world where thousands of people have to die of
starvation every year because there isn't enough food to go
around, have an entirely different concept of human life than
the ordinary occidental.
On other scores, too, it was difficult for Americans to
understand the Japanese. Corporal punishment is a normal hazard
in their lives. A policeman in prewar Japan did not just stop a
traffic violator and give him a ticket. The offender was
stopped, snatched out of his car, slapped soundly, and kicked on
the shins. Then, and only then, he got his ticket. Corporal
punishment was the usual form in the Japanese army where
discipline was revered as t h e sanctified duty of every noncom
and officer. The officers beat the sergeants. The sergeants beat
the privates. The higher ranking privates beat the lower ranking
privates. Any infraction of the rules brought about some form of
corporal punishment.
Prisoner Morale
The ability of the Americans to absorb punishment and come
up smiling baffled the Nips no little bit. I know of one night
in particular that made me proud to be an American. That day the
boys had been sent out on the regular rice field detail. On the

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day in question, the boys felt the quota assigned for the day
was too great. They stalled, loafed on the job and generally
were a very reluctant group. By quitting time that evening they
still had accomplished only about three-fourths of their quota.
The Japanese sergeant was a very unpleasant fellow with a very
bad temper. He told the senior American the boys would have to
stay till they finished their quota. It was well after dark when
they did. The moon was up and the jungles surrounding the huge
rice fields hummed with night life. Finally, as the boys
finished their tasks and were lined up, the sergeant and his
guards headed them back to camp. They were a very tired, muddy
and hungry lot.
For the first half mile they trudged along sullenly,
muttering only from time to time as they slopped through a muddy
puddle left by the afternoon rain. Then someone began to sing
one of those mournful Southern folk songs. A few joined in.
Then, as they finished, one boy struck up with "God Bless
America.” Immediately a dozen voices joined in. Then there were
more. As their strides picked up the rhythm quickened and others
joined in. With their heads held high, the whole crew of two
hundred men was singing that beautiful, inspiring song through
the jungles of Mindanao.
Those of us who were waiting anxiously for the return of
the rice detail heard them coming. As they neared the prison
compound, we picked up the song and its stirring cadence filled
the night air with all the fierce love of liberty that this song
can generate.
Even the Japanese guards had caught the spirit of our tune.
When the men approached the gate, the guards stood at attention,
with rifles held at the salute. The boys marched in, arms
swinging, heads high, and a song on their lips. They had to be
up and out at five the next morning but there was not a
depressed man in camp that night. Each of us knew we were
Americans. Each of us had reaffirmed his faith in his brothers.
Each of us knew that we had a lot of fight left to face an
uncertain future.
From that day on, too, I feel the Japanese knew they could
never whip us or starve us into submission.
Some Fellow Prisoners
And so, without trying to pass judgment, lay the blame, or
point any scornful finger, we turn to some of the men who were
my fellow prisoners at Dapeco. There were many fine boys in that
camp. Some of them were professional soldiers. Many of them were
Reserve officers just out of school. Many of them were draftees,

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fresh from the farm or city. It was, most surely, a cross
section of America.
Murray Day came from the far northeast of New Hampshire.
Bill Miles came from Middletown, Ohio. There were boys from
Alaska, Florida, Texas; units from New Mexico, and Salinas,
California, maintained their integrity in a bond of friendship
with one another. There were youngsters like Curtis Hankins, who
on one occasion denied himself a couple of small candies and
fashioned a crude Christmas note to attach to them when he
brought then over to me in the hospital on Christmas Day. There
were old men like Colonel Edwards who had over thirty years as a
finance officer. He had received his orders for return to the
States and retirement when the war broke out. In prison camp,
relieved of his responsibilities for handling U.S. government
funds, he indulged his desire to gamble. Abiding by the strict
regulations pertaining to the activities of finance officers,
Colonel Edwards had not touched a card or entered into any game
of chance during his long and active service. It cannot be said
he actually wanted to gamble. He was merely put in a position
where he was forbidden to play games of chance. In prison camp,
he indulged in playing cards for a stake. The payment was made
in the form of I.0.U.'s.
It was fellows like Colonel Edwards that made life at
Dapeco livable. His good humor and quiet assurance gave strength
to all of us. On more than one occasion I saw him standing
clothed fully in a "G" string, haggling good naturedly with a
private, similarly clad, over the number of cigarettes a choice
piece of food might be worth. When we kidded the Colonel about
his dealing, he would always smile and tell us what a good deal
he made. Colonel Edwards was one of our chief entertainers at
our variety shows, too. His determination to "see this thing
through" lent strength to those of us who faltered in our
stride.
Other men added their share to this reservoir of courage.
Two junior officers of the Air Corps were particularly good
friends during my stay at Dapeco. One was Patrick Rafferty. A
Boston Irishman, young Pat Rafferty had trained for the
priesthood before deciding that the cloistered life was not for
him. He was graduated from Boston College and then took flight
training for the Air Corps as an observation pilot. Here again,
a good academic background, coupled with an understanding and
keen mind as well as a fine sense of comedy, made just being
around him a stimulating experience. Pat read to me on numerous
occasions and the stories still live in my memory as he
characterized their voices and actions.
Bill Chalek was the other of this pair of officers. Bill,
with a brilliant legal mind, was an attorney as well as a pilot.

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He had none of the sweetness or self-abnegation of Pat, but he
could stimulate a group with his conversation and intellect.
Another great soul was Timothy Wholly. While at Dapeco, Tim grew
a huge, glistening, black beard. It gave him a rather
frightening appearance. On the contrary, Tim was a gently loving
person with a ready laugh. His good friend, Ned Gilbo, was
another such.
I have mentioned Father Kennedy and Father LeFleur before.
Father Kennedy had set as his goal to be the finest Jesuit
priest in the Philippines. He worked hard at the job in prison
camp. A cripple since childhood from a fall off a horse, Father
Kennedy had not taken part in many of the sports of his
playmates. His assignment to Mindanao after graduation from the
seminary had put him in a position to help mankind among the
natives. He must have done a grand job. Now that he was thrown
among Americans again, able to be of assistance, he redoubled
his efforts. No sacrifice was too great for Father Kennedy. It
was he who prompted me to differentiate between the Protestant
and Catholic Divines by saying that one could get spiritual help
and comfort from the Protestants, but if you needed your dirty
clothes washed you went to the priests. It was the Catholic
priests who seemed to have the real, self-sacrificial spirit of
Jesus. While this may be too general a statement to make, it can
certainly be said of those two Catholic priests in particular.
Father LeFleur was the epitome of all that is good in
Christianity. His capacity for doing good, his willingness to
sacrifice was so much a part of his every breath that the men of
Dapeco loved him as they loved no other.
Father LeFleur demonstrated his great sense of duty by
volunteering to accompany a detail of some 800 men of the camp
when they were detached to another part of the island as a labor
battalion. That group was transported toward Manila in September
of 1944. Their ship was sighted and fired upon by an American
submarine and only 86 of the 750 survived. Survivors of that
group, whose story will be told later, never failed to tell me
that Father LeFleur refused to leave the hold of that torpedoed
ship as long as another man remained that might need help. "The
last I saw of LeFleur," said one, "he was passing the injured
topside."
Many other men were part of my life at Dapeco. Some of them
had served with me before, during the battle of Bataan. They
were privates-- the little men in the army. No man goes
according to rank when the going is tough. Some of these "little
men" grew in stature and leadership under stress to a degree
that amazed their fellows. Some broke in body and spirit. They
died soon. Here again, I do not try to pass judgment. Forces of
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forces had a greater effect than upon others. I had to stand
alongside while Eddie Drieth, a truck driver of my old outfit,
the 7th Materiel Squadron, sank lower and lower as he was
ravaged by malaria and dysentery. We had nothing to give him
that would stem the disease. We saw Eddie fight right down to
the very last, get a good grip on some great inner strength and
begin to win his fight. Over a period of a year, he fought his
way back to health and good deeds. When we got to Dapeco, a bit
of extra food and a few friends, Eddie took fresh courage with
every mouthful. He even got a bit fat. Eddie used to come over
to the hospital and visit with me and tell me about his work in
the rice fields and on other work details. He was a lovable boy
and his loss later on a prison ship was a personal one for me.
Other boys in that camp at Davao helped me make the days
brighter by their cheery words. I was no great conversationalist
to visit. My hearing was very poor. My eyesight was so limited I
could not recognize a friend till he approached within a few
feet. My legs were useless and most of my wants had to be tended
by friends or the corpsmen of the hospital. It was the courage
and strength of many of those boys that pulled me through.
Sergeant Loyd Work was another frequent visitor to the
hospital. I had known Loyd before the war during my service at
March Field, Riverside, California. Loyd was a medium height,
fat boy. On the prison camp diet, he slimmed down to expose a
figure with well-turned shoulders, slim hips and a well-muscled
build. That diet might have been killing him as he often said it
was, but it surely kept Loyd in fighting trim. Within a few
months after he returned to the States after the war, Loyd was
right back at a sloppy, fifty pounds overweight. But he seemed
as healthy and, I know, ten times as happy, as he was at Dapeco.
Social Life
Many of this group used to gather every evening after
supper around my bunk for our evening game or bull session. We
cooked up question and answer games that were made as
complicated as we could imagine. In one of the favorites one man
would be "it". He would think of the name of a well-known
character in life or history. Suppose, for instance, he decided
he was Machiavelli. He would tell the group, "I am M."
The first member of the group would think of some wellknown
personage whose name started with M. He might say, "Are
you a great ball player of the early 1900’s?" The one who was
"it" would have to think of a great ball player whose name
started with M. If he thought of Bat Masterson or some other
whose name started with that initial, he would say, "No, I am
not Masterson." If he could not think of the right name, he

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would say "pass" and the questioner would get a direct question
such as, "Are you a man?" This game would go on for hours, and
sometimes days. We had about two hours after supper each night
before it was time for lights out. In that tropical land the sun
goes down about 6:30 every night of the year and it gets dark.
Along with occasional sings and quiz shows, these games were a
constant source of pleasure for our small group.
While we are dwelling on the lighter side of life in jail,
I must not fail to mention mail from home. The first batch of
letters, perhaps half a hundred in all, came into camp about the
middle of 1943. Though they were written almost a year before,
during the blackest hours of the war for the United States, they
raised a pother of hope, speculation, and cheer. The letter s
bore the big stamped, "CENSORED," across the face of the
envelope. A few parts of some letters were cut out. While they
contained no news of the war, most everyone, for they were
considered common property, read some hidden meaning in every
sentence.
The first few letters were not restricted as to length.
They dribbled in from time to time. I received perhaps about ten
while I was at Dapeco. I waited most hungrily for those from my
wife. She spoke of the little happenings of daily living, of the
small comings and goings of herself and the people we knew. They
contained a fervent message of longing and love. They were a
great source of strength and courage.
When the mail was brought in and my name was called, I took
the letter and put it carefully in my pocket or some other safe
place. When Father LeFleur came in from Evening Mass, he always
stopped by to say hello. He would sit down, surrounded by as
many as could crowd around the wooden bench that served as my
bed. With a great hush of expectancy, he would open the letter
and read. By the time he finished there was not a dry eye in the
group. For a very few minutes we had all been transported back
to the homeland and hearth and tender hands we so loved and
lived for.
One of the most pleasing letters I received was from my
small niece, Janie. In her childish scrawl she said, "Dear Uncle
Bill: When are you coming home? We wish you would for we miss
you. I broke my leg but it is better now. We have a dog. Love,
Janie."
Some boys received letters containing long paragraphs
about, "You poor dear boy" or "Why has this wicked war taken you
away from me?" This sort of thinking had very little appeal for
most men. In the first place, we all felt we had proved
ourselves to be men, not boys. We felt we had done a good job in
holding the Nips at bay twice as long as the war plans called
for. We all wanted to get home to our loved ones and the steak

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and potatoes the Americans had in their refrigerators but we
most surely did not want to come home till this job had been
buttoned up with a complete victory. As has been said by many a
writer on the experiences of war before, when a man is fighting
his best, he will frequently pause for a second to think, "If
only Mother could see me now."
Each man felt he was a man among men. He need not hang his
head in any company of adventurers again. To write to him or
think of him as a groveling prisoner tore at his ego most
cruelly. We were not groveling, nor timid and we were doing our
best to give the Nips a hard time of it. We were not "poor
boys." We considered ourselves fighting men with a job still
undone.
The later letters we received were cut by Japanese order to
twenty-five words. They did begin to come through faster,
though. We marveled when some arrived within a few months of the
writing date. One wife, Mrs. John Beal, of El Paso, wrote
frequently and in a most belligerent vein. Somehow the letters
were passed through the censor. They called a spade a spade in
condemning the Nips and telling just what we were going to do to
them.
We were permitted to write cards at intervals, too. They
were a multiple choice sort of thing. The printed matter would
say: "My health is _________________ ." Then the writer was
supposed to check one of the following: "Good, Fair, Average, or
Poor." Another printed sentence said: "Give my regards to
________________ ." We were told to insert the name of a friend
or relative. There was one line, I believe, where we could write
half a dozen words or so. That and our name completed the
message. My wife got six of these cards during the three years.
One was received after my return.
Another event each of us looked forward to at Dapeco was
his birthday. It was a practice there to give an extra large
dipper of rice to the man celebrating his anniversary date. He
also got a cigar made from some of the tobacco that came into
camp. It all made for a little something out of the ordinary and
it was always a big occasion each day to learn who had a
birthday.
Talking over the rumors of the day was a great pastime for
us at Dapeco since we could get little accurate news. For a
time, the Nips sent in a few copies of an English language
newspaper. It was filled with lurid stories of the experiences
of Japan's “Wild Eagle" airmen and how they decimated the ranks
of American flyers. These stories invariably began with an
account of the “Wild Eagles" encountering a vastly superior
force of American planes. They would proceed through the initial
phases of the combat, explaining how the "Wild Eagles of Nippon"

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tore furiously at the opponents. The inevitable last sentence
spoke in glowing terms of the complete and decisive victory of
the Japanese with "all Wild Eagles returning safely to their
base and the few remaining enemy last seen fleeing in the
direction of the open sea." We listened politely to these
stories for a time, but soon took to laughing outright as each
new catastrophe overtook the Americans. Finally, the Nips gave
up their attempts to influence us and withheld the papers from
the prisoners, saying, “You are cynical men and do not believe
the truth."
At any rate, we did not believe. We had one set and firmly
held conviction--that the Yanks would be back. We knew it might
get worse before they got there, but we knew they would be back.
It was only for us to stay alive till we saw them marching down
the road. Each of us had a good grip on life by now and were not
fixing to let go.
The Japanese were consistent in their attempts to foster an
atmosphere of disunity and anarchism within the camps. It was up
to us, then, to find some rallying point, some symbol of unity,
a method of holding the men together. In our half-stumbling way,
we set about finding some answers to this major problem. We
organized a crude camp show. This involved writing our own
poems, producing our own skits and telling our own stories. We
sang songs and listened to lectures.
It was at one of these shows that I first heard this story
concerning General MacArthur:
It seems that General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz were out
fishing in a rowboat one day. A sudden breeze came up and the
boat overturned. Admiral Nimitz said, "Mac, you've got to help
me. I can't swim a lick."
General MacArthur helped the Admiral into the boat and
started paddling toward shore. The Admiral said, "Mac, I ask
your promise that you won't tell my boys that I can't swim."
The General thought a minute and answered, "I won't tell
your boys that you can't swim if you promise not to tell my boys
that I can't walk on water."
On another occasion, another of the boys came up with a
poem, a parody on one of Kipling's that about summed up our
plight:
"I've dug a thousand foxholes,
I ate ten tons of rice,
I smoked those native cigarettes,
And fought those native lice.
I've cussed those cooks and K.P.'s
For the food they did devour
And I've washed a million mess kits
And stood in line a million hours.

I built a thousand bivouacs,
I've walked ten million miles
I ain't heard no cheering thousands
And I ain't seen no damsels' smiles,
I chased a million mosquitoes
And never one did catch,
And the rotten chow I've had to eat
Would make your stomach retch.
But when my work on earth is done,
And I've laid aside life's cares
And pulled my last maneuver
And climbed those golden stairs,
The angels all will greet me,
And the harps begin to play
And I'll buy a million American cigarettes
And smoke them in a day.
And the Great Commanding General
Will smile at me and tell,
'Take a front seat, soldier,
You've done your hitch in Hell.'"
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The finale of each of these shows at Dapeco was a brief
display of the American flag. It was the only one I had seen in
prison camp. One of the boys had smuggled it in sewn inside a
folded blanket. As the last act of the show moved off the rough
boards that served as a stage, we all stood, bareheaded and
silent. The man with the special blanket walked slowly to the
platform, unfolded the blanket and showed us the flag. It was
not a large flag. It was a bit tattered and dirty. It was faded
from long use. It was that flag, though, that seemed to lift our
spirits as little else could do. We stood quietly, reverently,
watching with a prayer on our lips. This, we knew, was a symbol
that would not fail us. All we had to do was stay alive long
enough.
Doctors and Diseases
Lest I have given the impression that Dapeco was a
lighthearted rest camp, let me cite some of the problems that
confronted us. Over 95% of the camp, as I have mentioned before,
were suffering from recurrent malaria. The female Anopheles
mosquito of that section was a robust and avaricious creature. I
well remember the 15 or more series of chills and fever I had
during the 18 months we spent there. Other men seemed to suffer
more. Some suffered less. Some of our men were stricken with
strange, tropical maladies. I well remember seeing several men
brought in paralyzed stiff as boards from unknown causes. They

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had to be fed intravenously for weeks before they recovered use
of their limbs. During all this time, they seemed to have no
control over their bodily functions.
Many of the rice field workers were hospitalized
periodically with rice poisoning. This came from working hipdeep
in muddy water and scraping against the sawtoothed edges of
the rice plants. The small scratches became infected and caused
a swelling that turned the patient into a grotesque, bulbous
mass. It was not considered serious and a week's vacation seemed
to allay the infection.
Over a hundred of us suffered for almost a year from a
tropical cellulitis. This would start in the form of small
blisters on the arms and legs. The blisters broke and the
infection spread. Sores developed that scabbed over. The scabs
sluffed off and drained pus. There was more spreading till the
sores attained the size of half dollar pieces. Twenty or thirty
of these draining, smelly sores on the arms and legs made life
unpleasant as well as unsightly. The doctors concentrated on
keeping the scabs removed and having the patient wrap himself in
wet compresses. Some of the time, we had hot boric acid solution
as a wetting agent. Sometimes, we used only boiled water. After
three days of soaking night and day, the bandages became so
smelly they had to be boiled out. We used old toweling, torn
blankets, or old underwear. Our few bandages were saved for more
serious problems.
Of these, there were many. Sometime before we left Dapeco,
the surgical assistant, Corporal Kohnour, told me he had logged
over 300 separate operations. They ranged from appendectomies to
amputations. The wood cutters on occasion missed their mark and
split a toe. Someone would get a foot under the wheel of the
rice field train. Abscesses were continually appearing as the
breakdown of tissue from lack of nourishment put bodily
functions under severe strain.
For all this surgery, an operating room was necessary. That
we had. It even had a set of overhead lights. No power was
available during the daylight hours and the light from the
windows was poor. The doctors risked the event of power failure
e and operated mostly at night because the lighting was so
improved by the use of the floods overhead.
For operations, sterile technique is a necessity. That
means sterilizers and alcohol. Dr. Brown, who could lecture so
effectively on many subjects, built a sterilizer out of an oil
drum. (He also built a crude still for the manufacture of
alcohol out of some cast off pipe and a small pump to circulate
water.) Let it be said to the credit of all concerned, that no
misuse of the alcohol ever came to my attention. The basic
ingredient was fermented rice.

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The Japanese used commercial grade alcohol in many of their
trucks. On at least one occasion, some of the boys, working in
the Nip's Motor Pool, got hold of some of this and got a bit
high. In their attempts to find out where the boys got the
stuff, the Japanese stood the culprits in a dishpan of water and
flicked them over the naked bodies with 110 volt electric
current. The perfect ground supplied by the water increased the
shocking power of the current till it was strong enough to knock
a strong man off his feet. The Nips did have a doctor stand by
with adrenalin in case the offenders' hearts were affected. The
boys never would divulge the source of their supply and were
finally released.
Lieutenant Johnnie Winterhalter was a tall, trim, 180
pounds of the best in Marine tradition. A graduate of Annapolis,
he had elected to go Marine as did many of the Naval Academy's
best. Because of his good health and the nature of his calling,
Johnnie was assigned to supervise the bridge over the small
creek between the main prison camp and the general mess hall.
One day Johnnie was stricken with a slight fever. His legs
first felt numb, then weak. He collapsed and the first case of
polio was rushed to our little hospital. Johnnie suffered a
total paralysis from the waist down. He remained that way for
the next two years that I know of. At least two other cases of
polio were brought into the hospital about this time, as well.
One, a boy by the name of Dawson, suffered a less severe
paralysis of the left side. A third case was still less severe
and made a partial recovery.
How this disease struck at us, isolated as we were in the
heart of the jungle, baffled the doctors. Polio is almost an
unknown disease in that part of the world. We assume we brought
the disease with us. The incubation period, being long, delayed
this flareup. At any rate, polio was just another problem for
the doctors at Dapeco. They fought it well as they had fought
many other afflictions.
Prison Routine
The question has often come up, "Just what do prisoners of
war do?" Well, the answer is, they do what they are told to do.
In our case, the daily activity could never be depended upon.
This was really a planned change of pace by the Nips. When you
get into a very regular routine, it is easy to determine the
habit patterns of the guards and other camp officials and plan
an escape.
At Dapeco, there were regular details each day. The rice
fields took all the more healthy men. They worked from before
dawn till after dark most days. Vegetable details and food

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carrying details took other men outside the wire. Basket-making
was a chore for the less able men. Trimming trees and grass
inside the wire kept others busy. Much of this was "make work."
That is, it could have been done much more easily by other
methods.
The "close-in" details quit early and bathed at the
“wells.” These were boarded up holes in the ground just outside
the barracks. A platform around each of the two holes made it
easier to let the five gallon can down and bring up the water.
You simply got a bit of water, rubbed yourself all over with a
cloth or stone and then pulled up a can-ful to pour all over
your head. Soap was a luxury not often seen. As a matter of
fact, there were times when we did not see soap for a year at a
time. In the hot, damp climate, a good sweat and a rinse with
water could work wonders at getting clean. We had been more-orless
weaned of using too much water early in our prison camp
career. For an experienced prisoner, it was no trick at all to
wash his teeth, bathe, and wash out a set of underwear in a
canteen cup of sixteen ounces of water.
Our heads, we usually kept clipped close. That was a health
measure as well as an easy method for washing. Our most usual
garb was a "G" string or pair of shorts. Most of us had a pair
of "travel" pants and shirt. Most had a blanket, too. Mosquito
bars were a great luxury and most had one. It is pretty rugged
and dangerous, too, to sleep in the tropics without some
mosquito protection. At Dapeco, we had lots of malaria but
little or no dengue fever. In Manila, we had no malaria except
that which we carried there but we had dengue. More about this
later.
After working hours, the men rested and talked. There was
some reading matter passed from hand to hand and it was in great
demand. Most conversation was about food. When you were not
talking about it, you could hardly help but think about it.
Waking up in the middle of the night with a vivid picture on
your mind and the tantalizing taste of a cake or butter was not
uncommon. Most men tried to regulate the nature of their
yearning for food. Some thought in terms of fancy desserts.
Other restricted their yearnings toward those dishes we might be
able to get, such as fancy rice dishes and fried bananas. The
craving for oils and sweets was overpowering at times. A
spoonful of very poor grade sugar was doled out about once a
week during our stay at Dapeco. It was a welcome addition to the
rice. We also had a small ration of salt fish about once a week.
Talk about food was first. Talk about friends and family
certainly was second. Some men worried about their loved ones.
This was really a sign of the initial stage of mental breakdown.
The steadier hands counseled and rightly, that unless the

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mainland of the U. S. were invaded, we need not be too concerned
over the welfare of our families who might be dependent on us
for support. It was a matter of deep concern to many, however.
Many men in the depths of that rigidly controlled social
group found an emotional peace they had lacked as protagonists
in a work-a-day world. In many ways, we all felt we were
essential to the welfare of the whole group. We knew the group
was essential to our welfare. We were a very tightly bound
community. No one rushed in from work and got ready to go out on
a date. There were no movies, no radios, no dances. We had to be
content with each other's company. Each man had his special
friends and those with whom he did not choose to associate. No
one was excluded from any gathering though. We all had someone,
the Yanks, to love. We all had a common enemy, the Japanese. We
all had high hopes of living till the Yanks came into get us.
There was never any doubt in the minds of any that they would be
back. Our job was to live till they got there. Every day we
stayed alive reinforced our resolve to live another day.
The men who died in prison camp died early. Whether from
disease, wounds, or lack of faith, I cannot say. Some died of
each. Those who lived through the first year were awfully hard
to kill. Many men lived whom the doctors said could not be
expected to live. They lived because they refused to die.
When you saw a man, so weak from dysentery and malaria he
could hardly stand, take his canteen of water and go out to
bathe and wash his clothes, you knew he was just forcing himself
to maintain standards he had learned earlier. Those were the men
who fought their way through. They took care of themselves
because no one was strong enough to take care for them.
This then seems to be about the sum of my story of Dapeco.
At any rate, these are some of the thoughts that ran through my
mind as I lay on the litter, close by the cook shack that night
of June 4, 1944. We had talked this move over many times. The
general consensus was that it had to be made and that it
wouldn't be an easy move. We were braced for it emotionally and
physically. There are few things in this world quite as bad as
our minds can conjure up in imaginative meanderings on the
subject. The only thing that always seemed to turn out worse
than our most dire predictions was a ride on a Japanese prison
ship.

CHAPTER IX
DAVAO TO MANILA
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Finally, the word came that the Japanese were ready with
the buses. The corpsmen picked up our litters and filed off
across the grassy field in the darkness. The clouds still sailed
slowly by on the warm night air. The moon had not risen yet but
there seemed to be enough light to see quite well. We saw
several buses lined up on the edge of the field. They were in
pretty bad shape but then all Japanese rolling stock was in bad
shape. All of us who could be gotten up were lifted off the
litters and placed on benches in the first bus. We were told to
wrap our towel around our heads, completely covering our eyes,
nose and mouth. Then, a rope was passed around our necks and on
to the neck of the next man till we were all tied together. Then
another rope was used to tie our wrists in the same manner. The
wrists were tied in back of us, by the way. We were admonished
not to move or talk. We s at silent for another hour before the
bus jolted off. As I remember, it was about two in the morning
when the bus left. I am judging by the time that elapsed after
we left the hospital. We arrived at our destination on the Davao
docks about ten the next morning. At any untoward movement of
any of the prisoners, a Jap guard would reach over and tap the
offender with a long stick. Weak as we were, we stood that ride
pretty well. For the last several hours, I was nauseated and
hoping I could keep my stomach under control till I got that
towel off my head. No sooner was it taken off and the fresh air
began to wake up my lungs than I was very sick. I leaned out the
window and vomited again and again. Then I felt better.
The noontime sun on the Davao dock was boiling hot. We were
helped to places near the edge of the pier where a small barge
was picking up men for the journey to the ship that lay at
anchor. A few of us litter cases were taken on each load. I was
very sick again when I was first taken aboard the bigger ship. A
Japanese officer merely motioned the men to lay me to one side
while I finished vomiting. After an hour or so, he directed a
couple of boys to take me below.
On this momentous day, in another part of the world, even
greater events were taking shape. This was June 5, 1944, the "D"
day for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe by units of
the Allied forces.
I had seen the inside of these Japanese prison ships
before. The holds were broken by tiers of wooden shelves. There
were, by actual count, only about two square feet of space per
man on this ship. We had eight hundred prisoners in the one hold
and the other four hundred in another hold. I was placed with

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the other sick men in an area up on one of the shelves right
next to a major who was running a high fever. I can still feel
the hot, dry, parchment-like texture of his feverish skin. That
shelf gave us about 18 inches of headroom and was about six feet
long. We were aristocrats as far as room was concerned. The rest
of the boys were really cramped. There was a light expectancy in
the air though. It had been announced that we would get some Red
Cross food packages when we got on the boat.
After we had gotten settled a bit, I talked with some of
the men who had come by other means of transportation. They told
me they had been loaded into trucks at the camp. Each of them,
as in our case, had been instructed to bring a towel. The towel
was wrapped around the man's head. Then each of the men standing
in the jam-packed truck had a rope passed around his neck and
connected to another man's neck until the whole group was tied
together. Then another rope was used to tie the group's hands
together behind them in similar fashion. The Nips were taking no
chances on escapees during that ride to the gulf.
As I say, we were pretty crowded in the amidship hold. The
saving grace turned out to be that any who could get up were
allowed topside. The hold of t hat stinking ship was hot as
blazes as she lay in the quiet gulf. Topside, where some of the
boys carried me one day, the tropical sun beat down with almost
hateful fury. Flies made the whole ship busy with slapping and
scratching. A light breeze above decks was the only saving grace
here and with darkness, the flies left and the air cooled.
We half expected the long wait in the harbor was to receive
the group of 750 men who had been detached from our group to
work on an airstrip at Le Sang. As day after hot day passed
without a sign of any activity ashore or on the water, we slowly
adjusted to the new problems of shipboard life. A small "head"
or toilet on the port gunwale provided the only means other than
buckets for relieving the men. Diarrhea and dysentery soon began
to show up with the lack of sanitary facilities. Long lines
formed for the use of the head. They did not slacken day or
night during the whole trip.
Late one evening after five blistering days at anchor, the
ship came to life and we moved out into the stream. Our ship of
perhaps 5,000 tons took its place among several others in a
convoy. We mounted a three-inch gun but that was the only
visible protection. An airplane patrol hovered around on
occasion during the next day and on through our coast-hugging
journey out of the gulf and eastward to Zamboanga. I believe we
were three days in arriving at this most southerly city of the
island of Mindanao. We dropped anchor there for the night.
Late that night, we were awakened by a scurring and
shouting on deck. A Japanese guard had found a pile of clothes

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near the starboard aft quarter. A hurried count and check of
names was held. Nip guards swarmed down into the hold to search
out the farthest corners. It was determined that Lieutenant
Colonel McGee was missing. The prison ship took on a grimmer
aspect after this. Colonel McGee had served a tour of duty at
Zamboanga and knew the country and its people. He was a fine
officer and no one begrudged him the right to escape. He had
simply slipped off his clothes and slid into the water during an
unguarded moment. How long he had been gone is anyone's guess.
Though the Nips sent out search parties in small boats and lit
up the harbor with lights, McGee made good his escape. We
learned later he made it to shore in good shape. He was brought
back to the U. S. on a submarine within a short time for a full
report.
For the rest of us, security regulations were stiffened.
Men were only allowed topside to go to the head. They had to
stand in line as usual and as one man would come out, the next
man would get a nod from the guard, salute him, and step across
the ten feet of deck to the entrance. With all the men in the
hold once again, the place became a maelstrom of milling
humanity. It was a hot, filthy place but there was still a note
of good humor among most everyone.
The ship got underway again before dawn. Our course now lay
around the southeasterly point of the island and into the open
sea headed for Cebu, some 200 miles north. At the time this
was only a conjecture but it turned out to be correct. We had
only been on our course an hour when a terrific clamor arose on
deck
It seems that one of the boys, Lieutenant Herb Wills, had
patiently worked his way up through the line to the top of the
steps on his way to the head. He received permission from the
guard to cross the deck. He started toward the door, shifted
suddenly, and kicked the guard in the chin as he leaped for the
rail. He was over the side and into the water almost before the
guard hit the deck. The alarm was immediate.
The Nips, awaiting just such an eventuality, had placed
barrels of gasoline or some other inflammable on the fantail.
The guard there shoved these overside and tossed a couple of
hand grenades after them. The aft machine gun opened up and
punctured the gasoline drums, setting them afire. We, in the
hold, could only hear the commotion and racket. One of the boys
caught a glimpse of the activity and relayed it down to us.
Though the ship never slackened pace, the firing and burning gas
continued for some time. Each of us offered up a silent prayer
for the success of Will's courageous attempt. We were almost
seven miles from shore in shark-infested waters. The night was
black as t h e inside of your hat and a man might swim out to

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sea as easily as toward land. Herb Wills' chances of surviving
were slim indeed, but there were few men who did not wish him
luck and Godspeed.
We learned later that Herb did make it to shore. He had
dived deep in his initial leap from the deck and deliberately
risked being sucked into the screws as he swam beneath the ship
to the port side. It was probably this maneuver that saved his
life. The firing was principally into the water starboard. Herb
was in good shape physically. He had been an experienced diver
and swimmer during his prewar days. He made the shore, was
picked up by friendly natives and operated with guerrillas for
some time before being returned to the States.
The caution of the Nips in skirting the coast on our trip
around to Zamboanga was well-taken as we learned later. The Le
Sang detail of 750 men who followed us to Manila a few months
later took the same course but was spotted by an American
submarine and torpedoed. Only 86 of the original 750 came out
alive.
This labor battalion, the Le Sang detail, that was sent out
to build an air strip near Davao was a tragic group. Some 750 to
800 men were selected from the 2,000 men of the original party
at Davao Penal Colony and transported to the labor camp. I know
little of the details of their life or work except that it was a
hard working group, fed rather well, and accomplishing little.
When the main body of Dapeco prisoners was transported back
to Manila, the Le Sang detail was shipped out on another boat.
They, like our party, hugged the coastline from the Gulf of
Davao to Zamboanga on the southern tip of Mindanao.
The story told me by one of the survivors, George
Robinette, was about as follows: Robinette said he had been one
of the first to board the original ship in the Gulf of Davao.
That put him up close to the boy in the hot, humid hold. A
submarine alert held the ship up in Zamboanga for almost ten
days. Conditions aboard the ship were intolerable. The food was
bad, water was scarce and salty, the heat was 90 or more degrees
with humidity close to the same figure. After ten days, the men
were brought up out of the hold, marched across the dock to
another ship, and sent below again. Robinette, being up in the
bow, was one of the last off the ship. He was, therefore, one of
the last aboard the new ship. He was about amidship. They cast
off sometime in the early evening or late afternoon.
Rumor had it that the ten day delay had been caused by the
presence of an American submarine. Within half an hour of
clearing the port, Robinette said, the ship was struck by two
tremendous explosions, one in the bow and one in the stern. From
his position amidship and under one of the hatch covers, he felt
the force of the shock and saw water come gushing in from both

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ends of the ship. He was in that area known as the ballast hold
and within a minute was awash with sea water. He managed to keep
afloat and rose with the water. He grabbed at lines from topside
and managed to reach the main deck only to find Japanese guards
on the bridge shooting at any prisoners who emerged from the
hold. Robinette did manage to get over the side of the ship and
into the water with only a floating plank as protection. The
ship sank within ten minutes. Only the men close to the hatches
were able to swim clear of the sinking hulk. In the half hour of
remaining daylight, the Japanese sent a rescue boat out to bring
in as many survivors as they could spot. One American resisted
so strenuously at being rescued that he tried to pull his
Japanese rescuer into the water. Japanese soldiers were also
being attacked by Americans in the water and their life jackets
ripped off them. Few of the Japanese could swim and they were
systematically drowned.
Robinette said that of the 23 men picked up in the lifeboat
by the Japanese, 22 were lined up against the railing of another
ship of the convoy and shot. The 23rd managed to escape in the
darkness, hide in the anchor locker and slip off the ship and
get to land.
Robinette made his way to shore after giving his plank to a
wounded officer. He was rescued by Filipinos. He was hidden that
night in a Catholic church and taken the next morning in a banca
across an inlet to a guerrilla camp.
On the way across the choppy waters of the bay, Robinette
was covered with a piece of sail. The heat, rough water and odor
caused him to vomit. In doing that, he stuck his head over the
side of the small boat and lost not only the contents of his
stomach but his false teeth. He dived overboard in a vain
attempt to rescue them. They dived faster than he could.
"My first good meal in freedom," said Robinette, "had to be
gummed."
Robinette and some 80 men out of the 750 survived the
sinking. After a period of recuperation on Mindanao near
Zamboanga, they were repatriated to the States aboard an
American submarine.
Our ship made the night dash from Zambo to Cebu in safety.
I am not sure just how long it took but it seemed like a long
time. We docked in the harbor and were due to get a rice ration.
Suddenly an "A-Warn" sounded and orders fame for us to be
unloaded but quick. We were practically thrown off the ship.
What disturbed us more, our rice ration was unceremoniously
dumped into the harbor as the ship pulled out. The raid did not
materialize and we were left, tightly guarded, on the blistering
hot dock. Cebu is well known as the hottest place in the
Philippines and we were not long in being ready to certify to

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the fact. After an interval, we were marched to an old (Cebu is
a very old town) stonewalled church yard. As a matter of fact,
one of the boys mentioned to me as we lay on the dock that the
island we could see offshore was Mactan, where Magellan met his
death during his visit to the Philippines hundreds of years ago.
He had volunteered to help the natives in one island subdue the
natives of another in his efforts toward making converts to the
Portuguese cause. The battle was a disaster and the Magellan
party was forced to flee.
Our church courtyard was not only as hot as blazes, it was
full of broken concrete cobbles. The men tried to scrape shallow
spots in which to make their beds. There were so many of us that
rocks scraped from one spot had to be pushed into space assigned
to another man. In the end, we were all so tired we slept right
on the rocks.
For three days, we were able to recoup some of our strength
in that hot, airless stoneyard. Conjectures and rumors of our
destination filled the air. Some thought we might go to Palawan
which was close by. The most general conviction was that we were
going to Manila or Japan. Both these surmises were correct; when
we boarded a ship again, it headed north and steamed into Manila
Bay in a few day's time.
Things were not going well on the ship by this time. The
congestion and salty water combined with the poor food had
brought many men down with dysentery and other illnesses. After
three days in the harbor, one man died. The Japanese decided we
were not fooling when we said the men couldn't stand the strain
much longer, so they docked. We were unloaded and marched into
Bilibid Prison. The litter cases were trucked in.
CHAPTER X
BILIBID PRISON, MANILA
Before we get involved with my life at Bilibid Prison for
the last eight months of imprisonment, let us have a look at
Manila and the tremendous bay that gave it such importance in
the Far East. My smattering of knowledge of the bay itself
consisted of an impression of the immensity only. We had not
been allowed topside during our three day wait in the harbor and
the brief glance we got during the unloading process showed us
only that it was filled with ships.
The island fortress, Corregidor, guards the entrance to the
huge bay. From the comparatively narrow inlet past Corregidor,
the distance to Manila is a matter of almost 20 miles. This is a
veritable sea in itself. The peninsula of Bataan extends down
one side of the bay to within three miles of Corregidor. The

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mainland forms the other side. Cavite, the naval base of the
Philippines, was located on this mainland side.
The strategic importance of Manila can be better understood
when it is known that almost half of the world's population
lives within 2,500 miles of the island capital. Most navies of
the world were predicated on a cruising radius of that distance.
Carriers and aircraft have changed that picture now but before
the war, naval strategy was based on some such figure.
At any rate, Manila Bay was a beautiful place. Lined with
green and approached through small, jungle covered islands, the
setting was truly tropical and luxuriant. It is significant,
also, that during the war, neither the Japanese nor the
Americans attempted a frontal attack on the harbor that had to
be entered past the fortress of Corregidor. The Americans had
built a system of defense there shortly after taking the islands
from the Spanish in 1898. A system of tunnels, gun emplacements,
and a connecting rail line gave a false sense of security to the
"Gibraltar of the East." Air power outmoded Corregidor just as
it did the battleship.
The thing that amazed me as I lay on a hatch cover waiting
to be carried over the side of our prison ship after she docked,
was the number of boats anchored in the harbor. We heard later
that these, being mostly supply boats for the Japanese war
machine, were manned by civilian crews. Once they got into a
snug harbor they were slow about getting unloaded and out to sea
again. American subs and aircraft were taking a heavy tonnage
during those days in1944. The Japanese military would rant and
scream but dock facilities had never been reconditioned since
the early days of the war and there was limited space for
unloading. Oriental labor, mostly Filipinos and underfed
Formosan natives, has always been notoriously slow. At any rate,
not a prisoner among us but ruminated on the lush target the
harbor would make for attacking aircraft.
Hanging over the railings of the bomb-torn deck structures
were hundreds of sightseeing Japanese soldiers, probably in
Manila on rest rotation. They looked well-fed and well-uniformed
as Japanese soldiers can look.
Bilibid Prison was not over a dozen blocks from the dock.
We rode through the streets where activity seemed normal but
almost autoless. The other boys were marched and were watched by
the curious and Sympathetic Filipinos. Aside from some
unrepaired bomb damage from two years before, when the Nips had
attacked Manila, the city looked much as it had before the war.
To many of those boys it was a nostalgic hike through the
streets they had trod many a time in prewar days.
My entrance into the prison proper is hazy. Only the vision
of a high-doored gate through the stone walls remains with me.

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Once inside, we few were unloaded from the truck and taken in
hand by a group of American Navy hospital corpsmen. These boys
were healthy looking, cleanly dressed and efficient. The
cleanliness of the prison yard was also impressive.
Bilibid Prison covers what would normally be about four
city blocks. It is surrounded by a wall, perhaps 12 feet high.
The interior is sectioned into four general parts by walls
running through the center. In the exact middle stands the
guardhouse where the guards on duty are quartered. Extending out
from this central point, like the spokes of a wheel, run the
cell blocks. There are other miscellaneous buildings but this is
the general pattern. There may have been some cell blocks with
individual cells, but most of the confinement buildings were
large with high ceilings and thick walls without too many
partitions. Openings in the walls were barred from floor to
ceiling. Heavy wooden shutters, three on each of the barred
openings, closed off the cell block during the night or whenever
the Nips felt this necessary. These shutters were hinged from
the top. They were usually propped open with lengths of wood
during the day and night. I stress this point, because during
the bombings that came later, the Nips ordered the shutters
closed at all times. When a large bomb landed close by, the
concussion was great enough to suck the shutters open and then
let them slam down again with much noise and clatter.
Bilibid was at once a rather remarkable place for me. I was
taken to the Sick Officer's Quarters, a clean, cool, uncrowded
building. It has a cement floor and whitewashed walls. For the
first time in over two years I had a real bed to sleep in, too.
Then wonders of wonders, the corpsman assigned to get me bathed
and comfortable, brought me a blanket and a clean sheet. It is
hard to convey the sense of security that small privileges of
this sort bring to one who has had so little and who has learned
to expect less.
The corpsman brought a pan of hot water and started to
bathe me. I lay quietly for a time, utterly drugged by the
luxury of that soft bed with a real mattress and the
peacefulness of the surroundings. For three weeks, we had been
under a terrific physical and emotional strain. I suddenly
became very thirsty. We had been issued a quart of water a day
during our trip and it was mostly salty. Here, I reasoned, if
they had pans of hot water they must have good drinking water. I
asked for some. Lo and behold, in a matter of minutes, the
corpsman brought ice water. I was suitably flabbergasted. That
was the only time I ever received ice water during my stay at
Bilibid or any other place in the Philippines during the three
years I was a "guest" of the Japanese government, but it was a
royal treat.

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In three weeks of filth and heat on a prison ship, one can
get pretty scummy. That corpsman did not hesitate a moment with
his work though. He started at my toes and worked toward my
head. Finally, I said to him something about being able to do
the job myself. He let me finish up and busied himself with
getting my gear together. He also promised me t hat if I was
strong enough I could take a shower the very next day. It seems
that in Bilibid Prison, they had a couple of flush toilets and a
hot and cold shower.
One of my first questions, of course, was about the chow.
On this score, the corpsman was not too enthusiastic. “What we
get is good," he said, "but the rice only runs about seven
ounces a day."
When our contingent arrived at Bilibid Prison late in June
of 1944, it was just the beginning of rainy season. Manila was
cooler at this time of year. Still it seemed hot to me after the
cooling breezes at Dapeco. I had been a bed patient now for
almost a year, but my general condition was much improved. The
beri-beri had eased off somewhat though the pain still racked me
at night. The tropical ulcers and scurvy had cleared up several
months before. My eyesight was adjudged at about 20-600. The
hearing problem had cleared up to a great extent, and life was a
very desirable thing.
Doctor Barrett took over my case and immediately ran me
through a series of tests.
This then was the introduction to Bilibid where I spent the
next eight months before the Yanks came storming into the city
in February of 1945.
I was impressed, mostly, with the orderliness and routine
of the Bilibid schedule. The doctors came in about 9 A.M. and
made their rounds. They were pleasant and thorough. They did not
get chummy as had most of our other doctors. The noncom in
charge of the ward medical personnel was a Chief Pharmacist's
mate. He ran the ward, too. On certain days the floors were
mopped. On other days, the cobwebs were dusted off the walls and
ceilings. About every two weeks, we each got a clean sheet.
These were signs of a past discipline that had been carried on
by well-trained men. This was a demonstration of the old adage
that discipline is not meant for good times. It is meant for the
times when the going gets tough. If you haven't learned it
before the going gets touch, you are often a dead pigeon before
you get a chance to learn it.
That is why many of the older men survived the hardships
and rough goings of the first months of prison camp. The younger
men had not been properly prepared to meet the sudden and
violent changes inhabits. They had no well-developed routine to
follow. No matter how hard the going or how tired he was, the

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old soldier always kept his rifle or firearm in shooting
condition. He always tried to wash his body and teeth each day.
He always paid close attention to the condition of his clothing
so it would be in the best possible shape. These small details
gave the older man a great advantage, even if only a 10%
advantage, over the younger men in many cases.
So it was at Bilibid Prison. The system the Navy hospital
units had developed for the care of sick and wounded stood up
under pressure. That is not to say the Army medics broke down
under the same pressure, but rather, they adjusted to it in a
different way. Bilibid Prison had more and better facilities
than any other camp I was in. When the doctor wanted a
Laboratory analysis of stools, blood or urine, they merely sent
it to the laboratory. They even had access to X-ray equipment. A
pretty thoroughly equipped dental office was in the prison as
well.
Bilibid was a processing point for all the prisoners in the
Philippines. Transfers from one camp to another most often went
through Bilibid. When groups were assembled for shipment to
Japan and Manchuria, they were processed at Bilibid. The
processing consisted in seeing that each man had a pair of
shoes, a blanket and cold weather clothes of sorts. At times,
the prison population in the military prisoner of war section
would run up to several thousand. At other times, it would drop
to a thousand or less.
To us, who had just come from less well organized and
equipped camps, it was, despite the small rice ration, a place
of comfort. Our ward even had an old broken-down wheel chair.
This allowed me to get around inside the building and,
infrequently, outside to sit in the sun.
S.O.Q
Many of the patients in the Sick Officers' Quarters had
been there for a long time. Many were amputation cases. They had
fashioned rude wooden legs out of sticks and seemed to get about
very well. There were cases like Lieutenant Jim Daly. He had
been hit on Bataan in February, 1942. The bullet had entered his
hip joint. The lack of facilities prevented its removal at the
time and Jim had no use of the hip joint. He could not walk well
or far, but his health otherwise was good. There were cases of
osteomyelitis due to bullet wounds. These needed constant
attention and Bilibid could accommodate them. There was my
bunkmate, Jake Sawyer. Jake had suffered an attack of Berger's

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disease just before the war and was in the hospital at Cavite
when the Nips captured Manila. *
The disease had necessitated the removal of both Jake's
legs close to the hip. Other than the lack of legs, Jake was
quite healthy. He always said he could get along on less food
because he had less to feed.
Jake enjoyed coffee and, having been at Bilibid Prison for
some time, had established contacts. Jake used to buy coffee
which he shared with me. It was "second run" coffee, having been
used once and the grounds dried and repackaged. By a little
judicious boiling, a very good brew could be produced. We also
had a friend in the Japanese galley who brought us banana peels.
These, we could bake or have baked for a percentage, and
crushed. They made a reasonably good, hot drink. Banana peel
coffee smelled like prunes but it was black and when hot, it
served as a good substitute for coffee.
There were a number of older men who had been at Bilibid
for two years. Some of them had established contacts outside the
prison for extra food rations. Some of them had managed to
obtain enough nichrome wire to construct electric hot plates for
cooking the extra beans and vegetables they received from
various sources. For a price anyone could get enough food. The
question was the lack of medium of exchange. Times had been
better at Bilibid, or so they told me. Now it was getting harder
and harder to scrounge an extra mouthful. Dr. Bill Waterous
seemed to be the most successful scrounger. Waterous was an ear,
eye, nose, and throat specialist in Manila before the war.
Dr. Waterous had a Reserve commission and was captured with
the rest of us on Bataan. I had gone to him at Cabanatuan for
advice when my eyes first began to go bad. His recommendation
was to eat all the meat and fresh vegetables I could get. He
could really give no other advice, I suppose, but I was pretty
grim when I walked out and back to our diet of polished rice. He
was a rather imperious mannered man used to dealing with
Filipinos. When an epidemic of diphtheria broke out at
Cabanatuan he did talk the Nips into letting him go to Manila
where he dug up enough anti-toxin to stop the disease. It had
killed 300 before it was stopped.
Now, Waterous fitted and sold glasses in Bilibid. The Nips
allowed him to contact the Filipino who had taken over his
business for the actual frames and lenses. Payment was made to
* Berger’s disease is a malady that restricts or closes off the small
blood vessels, usually in the extremities like the hands and feet, and
in time causes Gangrene. According to what Jake Sawyer told me the only
remedy known in 1941 was amputation of the limbs affected. Jake, having
seen the ravages of the disease asked that his legs, which were
affected, be amputated as near the hip as possible.

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Waterous in the form of notes for double the amount usually
charged. While this may have seemed usurious, it must be
remembered that many men he fitted had a very short life
expectancy. As a matter of fact, many of them did die or were
killed in the final months of the Philippine campaign.
The chief topic of conversation at Bilibid, as at all other
prison camps, was food. Just the mention of "hamburger" was
enough to draw a crowd. As I have said before, a close second in
order of importance was "family". Then came conjecture as to the
future plans of the Yanks.
When I mentioned to Commander McCracken one day that sex
and liquor rated hardly at all in our lexicon of important
subjects, he retorted, "The Good Book says, 'Survive and then
multiply.' You will notice that it says survive first."
In prison camp, sex as such was farthest from men's minds.
It was never mentioned in most congregations. The subject of
liquor was likewise just one of those things we did not talk
about.
The little, unimportant things that reminded men of their
families were very important. Stories that brought back memories
were told and re-told. Pat Rafferty told me of the time he tried
to polish his father's car with kerosene. He told of the details
leading up to the action and the aftermath. Father LeFleur told
me of the times he would stand outside the house during his
childhood periods of play and listen to the persons walking
around inside. He said he could distinguish the footsteps of his
mother and other members of the family. All these little items
were meat and drink for lonely men. That deep, dull pain of
separation lay in the hearts of each of us. Many and many a time
I would transpose the difference in time between California and
the Philippine Islands and conjecture on the activities of my
sweetheart and wife, Florence. It gave me tremendous strength to
know that she would be doing a good job of teaching school and
having faith in me. It never entered my head not to have faith
in her.
The subject of “What do the folks at home think of us” was
a very important one, too. We hoped we had done a good job on
Bataan and Corregidor and we hoped we were heroes but, as one
man said, "You don't win wars by capitulating to the enemy."
One night at Bilibid Prison, when the place was jammed with
a large group of men being readied for shipment to Japan, we
were awakened by whistles and bells and shouted commands. The
word was passed down to stand-by for a bango (count). The lights
had all gone out and we lay quietly, waiting for the next move.
The guards came in and made a careful check of numbers and left.
No other explanation came till next day. Then the grapevine got
the story around. A Japanese sentry, off duty, had a hurry-up

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call to urinate. Instead of walking down the stairs from his
second floor quarters near the front prison wall, he urinated
out the window. The urine made contact with the high voltage
wire atop the high wall. The sentry was immediately and
completely consumed in a flash of electricity. The power was
short-circuited and the fuses blown. The initial noise we heard
was the automatic alarm system going off. Then, before they
discovered the reason for the trouble, the Nips had rushed in to
find out who had tried to get over the wall. At least one Jap
was properly incinerated before going to his forefathers that
night.
Some of my friends I had not seen since Bataan were in
Bilibid during those late months of 1944. One boy, Corporal
Tanturri, had been a prisoner there for over two years. He had
worked on various details in and around the city. He told me
that during one period he had worked at a motor pool. At another
he had done sheet metal work. Loading and unloading cargo and
trucks was still another job these details performed. The guards
often let the boys buy coffee, peanuts and other foods from the
native peddlers. These they sold at high prices inside the
prison. Tanturri was loaded with cash. He gave me fifty pesos on
his first visit and also brought along some clean clothes, mine
having been lost in the move up from Davao. Later, Tanturri,
upon learning he was to be shipped to Japan, gave me five
hundred pesos. I sent some of it to Cabanatuan with a reliable
friend for distribution to the 7th Materiel boys there and gave
most of the rest away to men in our prewar outfit who came
through Bilibid. There were times when we could buy small
amounts of food if we had pesos. The only extravagance I
permitted myself was to buy a quart of coconut oil for 75 pesos.
This was an inconceivable treat. Jake Sawyer and I doled it out
at the rate of one spoonful a day on our rice ration. It lasted
for months and added a most delicious touch.
Gifts From Home
After I had been at Bilibid for a couple of weeks, a man
walked in one day and threw my blanket roll down on my bunk and
said, "I think this is yours."
It was, and my joy was beyond words. Inside that roll, I
had stowed the Red Cross food we had gotten on the boat at
Davao. It was, wonders of wonders, still intact. By what
miraculous circumstance it got through the hands of our men and
the Nips without being searched and robbed is beyond me. The
Good Lord surely had a hand in that process. About that time,
another windfall came my way as well.

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Chester Fast, the big, Navy Pharmacist Mate who helped me
on many occasions, came in one day and dumped a smallish box on
my bunk. It had obviously been subjected to weather and hard
wear. "I spent an hour going over those boxes up there," he
said, indicating with his thumb the front of the prison yard,
"and we think this is your box from home."
The cardboard carton had been opened many times it seemed,
but it had been retied and seemed pretty full so not a great
deal had been removed. Someone else's name had been written on
the face of the top, but my name was there. As the boys gathered
around, my shaking fingers tried to unknot the cord that held
the box together. Fast finally got a pair of surgical scissors
and cut the string. There, in a jumble of packages, was one of
the most delightful surprises I ever hope to receive. Small
packages of nuts, dried fruit, coffee, other foods and pencils
were packed in and around a G. I. shirt and cotton slacks.
"I will either prove or disprove the ownership of the box
right now," I told the boys as I took the shirt out and put it
on. Knowing this was one of the boxes our wives had been
permitted to send, I also knew my wife would get me a shirt with
37-inch sleeves that I needed for a fit. The shirt fit perfectly
and so did the pants. The lettering on the labels that
designated the empty vitamin envelopes was in my wife's
handwriting, too. A magnifying glass told me that. It was a
happy, happy day and I still marvel how she got so much in that
small box. Someone had rifled the package of the vitamin pills.
The nuts and dried fruit was full of weevils and the soluble
coffee was dissolved but it was all usable. Pat Rafferty and I
picked at the weevils for a time and then, as good hungry men,
shut our eyes and boiled up the rest with the fruit. The soup
and the bouillon cubes were the most tasty. Pat arranged to have
the stuff cooked and several of us split the result.
One portion of this incident did tend to liven up the
occasion even more. Tucked into the shirt pocket was a picture,
a snapshot. I could not recognize the people but one was a girl
and the other a Naval officer and the Naval officer had his arm
around the girl. I could tell by the dress that the girl was my
wife. Without a magnifying glass, I was somewhat more than
puzzled as to what Naval officer, though.
I knew the picture had been included to convey a message
and I sent out a hurried call for someone to find a magnifying
glass. In the meantime, the other officers in the ward, many of
them Navy men, were excessively philosophical.
"Monty," said they, "it just stands to reason that you
being away and all, the Navy should assign an officer to take
care of your wife."

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I could laugh at this along with the others because the
only Naval officer I knew who might even presume to get that
familiar with my wife was Commander Ernest Zinke, an old friend.
Still, though this fellow was not tall, he was not Zinke.
When, after a few hours, one of my friends brought the
magnifying glass in and I could identify the picture I could see
that the girl was, indeed, my wife and the fellow with his arm
around her was my brother. In my wildest flights of fancy, I
could not imagine my brother being a Naval officer, but this was
the message the picture had been intended to convey. My brother,
Jack, had indeed become a Naval officer and was stationed in
Long Beach, California.
It is hard to describe how just the slightest change in
taste will pep up any meal of rice. We loved the rice but an
added flavor was a most welcome treat. I nursed that small
quantity of food for many days, and shared it with many boys. I
felt a solemn obligation to give away at least a quarter of
anything I had that was extra. I somehow felt this was not too
much to put into the pot of general welfare for those who had
less than I. There were times when it came back many-fold and
times when it was “wasted," although I never felt it was really
wasted at any time. I also had a sense of well being and great
satisfaction when I had shared food with another.
These infrequent distributions of food and articles of
clothing were exciting hilarious frolics. Even we did not know
how important they were as morale builders. There was a certain
aura of competition. There was the "luck of the draw" involved.
There was the awe and wonderment at why one man should choose a
particular item that held absolutely no value to you.
We had all inspected the items carefully and decided on our
first, second and third choices. Major Wolfe, a smallish officer
in the S.O.Q. drew first choice of selection out of the hat on
the only occasion in the eight months at Bilibid Prison. He
chose a box of dried prunes. He took the chance that they would
be edible and they were.
On another occasion at another camp, Lieutenant Bill Oliver
drew first choice. He selected a big, handknit turtleneck
sweater. In a climate that seldom gets down below 85!, this was
patently a curious choice. Bill, however, was very proud of his
sweater.
More Fever
Within a week after we arrived at Bilibid, after our three
week trip from Dapeco, I came down with an attack of malaria. We
had not had access to quinine during the voyage and that was the
only thing able to keep the virus knocked down. When I felt the

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familiar chill coming on, I told the corpsman and he got
permission from the doctor to start a course of treatment. At
Davao, which was definitely malaria country, I had had an attack
every 28 days. I do not know whether this was always the case
with others but for me it was as regular as the clock rolled
around. Starting with the chill, we would get a four day course
of quinine of 30 grains a day. It seems there was not enough
quinine to give the medicine prophylactically, that is, 10
grains a day.
In Manila, where malaria had been whipped as a disease, the
doctors could prescribe what they considered a curative dose
over a period of time. Following the attack, I was put on a 40
grain a day dosage for almost three months.
As I have mentioned before, malaria is carried by the
female Anopheles mosquito. According to the information I was
able to pick up this hungry gal is as cagey as a mountain trout.
She breeds in the back-wash from fast running water. She feeds
only during the couple of hours of the early evening. In urban
areas, it is possible to wipe out the breeding places, but in
vegetated areas, like the southern Philippines, the job is wellnigh
impossible. All the boys in my Philippine Army unit, the
41st Division, who came from Batangas Province of southern
Luzon, had malaria. Those who came from around Manila had no
background of malaria though they certainly had no immunity. It
was not long after my bout with malaria that I came in contact
with another tropical fever, dengue, that really laid me out.
I had heard about dengue fever before, but it was not one
of the diseases we had at Davao. It was quite prevalent in
Manila, however. Dengue was, according to the doctors, a virus
very similar to typhoid fever. Unlike the typhoid fever, which
had a high mortality rate, dengue fever killed less than two
percent of its victims. It may have killed very few, but the
general consensus of opinion of those who suffered from it was
that they could die.
Dengue fever started out mildly enough. For several days,
from four days to a week or more, the temperature was not over
two degrees above normal. During that time, the victim developed
aches all over. The bones ached. The muscles ached. The skin
ached. The eyes ached so badly it was less painful to turn the
head to view an object than to move the eyes. The skin of your
scalp ached like fury. Dengue was well named "Breakbone Fever."
For four nights and days I lay as quietly as possible, trying to
console myself that it would not kill me. My friend, Commander
McCracken had the bug at the same time and we would lie in our
bunks side by side and make sarcastic quips about the doctors
who were such dunderheads they could not get at the root of this

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horrible malady. The very thought or sight or smell of food was
nauseating.
Commander McCracken, who never lost his sense of humor
under the most trying circumstances, would start complaining
early in the morning about the necessity of getting up to go to
the toilet. We would consider the possibility of wetting the bed
rather than make the effort to walk the 50 feet to the head. We
considered the possibility of relieving our- selves into a hat
and throwing it out the barred window. The catch in this was
that we had no hats. In the end, McCracken would slowly and
painfully rise and stagger down to the toilet, mumbling dire
threats to all mosquitoes as he went.
At the end of four days, my temperature went down to almost
normal. I stayed that way for 24 hours. Then, with a bang, it
shot up to about 105 degrees. I literally felt I was burning up.
In some cases with dengue fever, temperature of 107! was
reported. For four or five hours I really burned up the bed.
Then, as the fever broke, I began to sweat. My sheets got
soaked. The rolled-up blanket I used as a pillow got wet. My
mattress could almost be wrung out.
After four hours of sweating, there just didn't seem much
left to wring out of me. I was weak as a cat. For the next
couple of days, I just lay under my mosquito bar and drank
water. Aside from a deep depression and an abhorrence of food,
the after effects seemed nil. Within a week, McCracken and I
were both sitting up, waiting for the call, "Chow Down," once
again.
The devastating part of dengue is the lack of immunizing
drugs. The only thing the doctors can do is administer
sedatives. The next infected mosquito that bites you will
transmit the disease once again. I had dengue only once. There
were those who had it several times. To these unfortunate
individuals my hat is off.
Food At Bilibid Prison
The distribution of food at Bilibid Prison followed the
same well-ordered pattern that characterized many of the other
activities of the Manila establishment. Bilibid, by the way, was
built, as plaques on the prison buildings denoted, in 1898 when
American forces first moved into the Philippines during the Moro
Insurrection and the prior Battle of Manila Bay. The cell
blocks, built of native stone, were substantially the same as
the day they were built.
But to get back to the rice which was the most important
single element in our lives at the time. A captain of the
Veterinary Corps was the mess officer during my stay at Bilibid.

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I had known him when he was part of my sub-group at Cabanatuan
in 1942. Captain Gockenhour was a good officer. He made, by all
evidence that came to my attention, a good mess officer. This
was probably the most important post in the prison. It could
make or break the morale of the prisoners. I heard charges made
against Gockenhour but have yet to hear of any being
substantiated.
In one camp I was in, I know positively of instances where
the mess officer used his position to benefit a particular group
of men to the detriment of the rest. As an example of what could
be done in this direction, there is the case of the special
issue of meat, carabao, that we received. It was not a great
deal to begin with. It would have made an excellent meaty broth
for the whole camp to garnish their Christmas rice. The meat was
duly cooked for the required 24 hours in several big pots. Then,
and here is where the skullduggery comes in, the meat was lifted
out of the broth and served to the men of the camp. The broth,
which contained all the flavor and nourishment, was saved and
eaten by the special group. It was this sort of thing that made
the men suspicious of every strange move made around the galley.
Groups of men organized themselves into lookout squads to sit in
on the activities of the cooks during the daily operations.
At Bilibid Prison, rice was issued by the Japanese in
three-day lots to the galley. The issue was made by the bag.
That is, a fifty kilo bag was issued as fifty kilos, a kilo
being 2.2 pounds. The bag should have weighed 110 pounds. Often
the bags had been chewed by rats or "strafed" by the Japs or
others. Rice in Manila was worth upwards of 3,000 to 30,000
Japanese occupation pesos a bag and temptation was strong to
steal a few pounds. People were starving to death right in the
streets of the city. Rice, the staple diet, had become a luxury.
Our issue then was usually short. At best, it should have
amounted to 400 grams of dry rice per man per day. We could
expect to get between 300 and 350 grams. This amounted to a
little better than six ounces. The three-day ration was
calculated out with each issue. Cooking was done in a central
kitchen and the food was portioned out to food carriers of the
various cell blocks.
It was at this point that great care was taken to see that
every man was equally served. To us, in an economy of plenty,
the difference between one spoonful more-or-less seems petty. To
prisoners, operating on a starvation diet anyway, it was of
prime importance. Dippers, usually made of old sardine cans,
were on hand in each cell block. The rice was scooped up and
leveled off with a wooden paddle and dumped into the plate or
messkit of the prisoner. There was great concern as to the exact
method of this service. The server could not pack one scoop and

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leave one loose. In the S.O.Q., where I was located, we had the
services of an enlisted man as server. He was scrupulously fair.
This, then, was the actual operation of getting the food to
the prisoner. At the early meal of the day, we had what we knew
as "lugao” or soft rice. It was made by boiling one part rice
with six or eight parts water. With salt, it made a very
acceptable dish. At the late meal, we usually had steamed rice.
This was cooked with only three parts of water to one part of
rice. The manner of cooking was most important. The rice was
poured into boiling water over a very hot fire for a certain
time. Then, either the fire was pulled or doused and a wet sack
thrown over the big cowa for the steaming process. When one eats
nothing but rice day in and day out, one develops a finely
attuned taste for the commodity. A few minutes over or under
done could bring howls of protest from all quarters.
As I have said, our breakfast meal consisted of soft rice
with nothing added. If there was a supplement, it was added to
the evening meal. In each cell block there was a roster. It
listed where the food server started to serve the last meal.
That is, if he started with man number one today and had a small
amount left after he had served all the men, he gave half
portions as long as the rice lasted. That meant that several men
usually got a portion and a half. The roster was duly marked and
the next meal of the same kind, the server started where he had
left off. In that way each man had his proper turn at "seconds."
There was one roster for soft rice. There was another roster for
plain, steamed rice. Still another for rice with meat, with
sweet potatoes, and for a meal of rice with corn.
While this roster system seems a bit odd to us where the
extra few spoonfuls would not warrant the trouble, they were
jealously guarded and cared for documents. The colonels watched
the roster as avidly as the enlisted men. There was a thrill in
rising to the top of the list and being in line for "seconds”
for each of us. Part of this ceremony of having a look at your
place on the roster was, of course, as much something to talk
about as anything else. It made a topic of speculation and
conjecture. Something new, something different, or special to
add to the conversation of the day.
The cooks at Bilibid Prison took more pains with getting
the rice cooked properly and served tastily than at any other
camp I was in. There were times when the rice was burnt or
undercooked, but these times were few. There were a few tragic
times when the food server miscalculated and ran out before he
had made the rounds of all the prisoners. The men who went unfed
just had to wait till the next meal. Then, they got double
portions.

Starvation and Disease
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Just what is starvation? Early in the war missing a few
meals was no cause for great concern. The campaigning soldier
always knows fatigue and an empty belly. When we could, we ate.
We literally stuffed our gullets. Then came the period when
whatever we got was poor quality and at infrequent intervals. We
were still fighting a war and we said, "Wait till I get my
meathooks on one of those big steaks. I'll eat it raw."
We groused much and walked miles out of our way to get a
few mouthfuls of rice. Then came the day for me when I tried to
lift a five-gallon bucket of water. I thought it was nailed to
the ground. I realized for the first time that the lack of food
had begun to exact its toll. So, I tried to slow down. Every
short patrol was a never ending and extremely tiresome task.
There are those who say that after the fourth or fifth day the
pangs of hunger leave a person to be replaced by a quiet and
satisfied feeling. This may be true when the fasting is done in
an atmosphere of ease and quiet but the pangs of hunger left me
only when I was too sick to eat.
Besides the listless, dragging, weary feeling that
accompanies every step, there soon come the internal disorders
that beset the malnourished person. A great slackening of all
the muscular tone of the viscera causes the bowels to move on
the slightest provocation. Getting up six or eight times during
the night to urinate was a constant source of aggravation. When
you are starving to death, you also are too poor to have decent
clothing or a decent place to sleep. These all contribute to the
speed of the decline.
The next stage is the scurvy, and edema stage. In scurvy
the mouth starts to become sore like it was burned by hot
coffee. This sensation spreads to all parts of the mouth and
down the larynx. The gums bleed and the teeth are loose in their
sockets. Even breathing is a painful process. The edema or wet
beri-beri is evidenced by the swelling of the face and feet at
first. The skin is stretched taut and the sensation of walking
on tightly filled balloons makes any movement on one's feet very
unpleasant as well as painful. This swollen condition sometimes
lasts for only a couple of weeks or it may last for months. If
the edema progresses to the region of the heart, then that vital
organ is restricted in its function and the patient dies. By a
drastic cut in the consumption of water, this edema or swelling
can be fairly well controlled. Along with these blights appear
the skin-roughening symptoms of pellagra. By comparison, the
itch and burn and skin discoloration of pellagra were not
particularly offensive. The danger of the disease is in the
long-range effect. In time, it becomes very debilitating.

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As the swelling of wet beri-beri subsides, the ravages of
the dry type set in. The fingers lose their ability to
manipulate and the joints become painful in the extreme. The
feet ache almost constantly. The degeneration of the fatty
tissue surrounding the peripheral nerves exposes them to
constant irritation. This loss of dexterity extends to the feet
and causes a staggering intoxicated gait. The unsteadiness
increases as time goes on. The eyes begin to lose their clarity
and all objects become fuzzy. Often the ears become affected
with a roaring and buzzing that cuts the ability to hear
anything well. At one point, my toenails all came out.
The sleepless nights resulting from the intense pain in the
feet is accompanied by the scalding attacks of itching skin.
This "crud" as we called it, demanded scratching yet spread
rapidly when the infected parts were irritated. At night one
would wake up tearing into the raw red parts that conscious
daytime reason had cautioned one not to touch.
Then there were the tropical ulcers that seemed to deluge
whole groups of men at a time. It is supposedly not infectious
and I know of no direct cases of it being transmitted, but the
condition of many men physically made it appear all over camp
simultaneously. The little blisters would form in the area
between the fingers, spread over the rest of the hand, become
infected, and form large draining sores. There were many types
of this scourge and no two seemed exactly alike. Some cases of
this running, smelly, painful malady covering both arms to the
elbow and both legs to the hip lasted for a year. As soon as one
sore healed, another would break out.
Deficiency diseases such as Beri-Beri, Pellagra and Scurvy
are no longer common in the United States. Some doctors will
tell you they have seen only 1 or 2 cases. Beri-Beri is
sometimes found in alcoholics who like to drink their lunch
instead of eat it. They just starve themselves, the instant
carbohydrate alcohol satisfying their hunger. In the U. S., too,
the variety of foods available makes such diseases as scurvy and
pellagra unlikely.
In the Orient, though, it is a different story. Beri-Beri,
Pellagra and Scurvy are endemic. Not only is poverty a culprit
but national eating habits seem to contribute. Investigations in
Japan prior to WWII determined that there was a higher incidence
of Beri-Beri among the peasants during good rice years than in
poor crop years. Reason: it turns out that in poor rice years,
the peasants are forced to turn to a variety of foods, such as
Frogs, fish, cheap, unshelled rice. In good crop years, the
peasants eat only good quality, white, polished rice. This, of
course, has had the Vitamin B removed by the polishing and thus
is deficient.

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In the Philippines this was probably also very true. The
natives had a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in most
seasons but preferred rice, polished rice, for their every day
diet. To eat healthful number 3 rice that had not been through
the polishing process was unthinkable if one had money to buy
polished rice.
All this debilitating and painful condition made most men
liable to the ravages of any of the other diseases that swarmed
where any large group of unclean men is kept in unsanitary
conditions. Dysentery was the biggest of these hazards. There
was never a time when we were free from the threat of it.
Dysentery could be fatal overnight when the body was unable to
combat its drains on the system.
We found that elimination, the disposal of body wastes, was
almost as important as getting enough food. Where there is a
shortage of water, there develops the problem of disposal. It
was one we were always faced with.
In the 85! heat and 85% humidity of the Philippines,
anything that stood for long without cleaning was a perfect
medium for the incubation of germs. Any decaying matter was a
breeding place for flies. Flies spread disease. As the disease
spreads from one man to the next, it becomes more virulent.
Our answer to the disposal problem, was, of course, long
slit trenches or latrines. We had little or none of such common
necessities as lime or disinfectant. We used dirt to make the
effluent harder for the flies to reach. It seemed to do little
good. Then, too, during the rainy season, the drainage would
seep into our latrines and fill them. Such a common article as
toilet paper was either non-existent or too valuable to use in
its proper place. The leaves of trees or a rag that could be
washed was the answer to that problem.
In one camp, we dug a big, square hole for exclusive use as
a urinal. It was six feet deep and about ten feet square. It was
the only authorized place for some 4,000 men to relieve
themselves. Night and day it was in use. In the darkness of a
rainy night just making a successful arrival at the "spring" as
we called it, was a hazardous journey. The edges of the "spring"
in the rainy season were a quagmire. I know of more than one man
who lost his footing and fell, screaming, into that sea of
urine. This was, of course, always the occasion for much kidding
and horseplay, but it was no joke for the participant.
I can well remember, too, the nights and days of utter
despair and discouragement over long attacks of dysentery. I
always tried to keep two pairs of underpants or loin cloths.
This "G" string was a simple garment. It was, perhaps, six
inches wide and two feet long. A string was sown across one end.
The string was tied around your waist and the cloth brought up

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through the crotch and secured under the string in front. In our
primitive civilization, it was a satisfactory answer to the
clothing problem for most occasions.
When one had dysentery, it was very important to keep one's
"G" string clean. There were times when a sudden cramp and bowel
movement would leave you gritting your teeth in the knowledge
that you had made a mess. This often happened at night before
you could get out to the latrine. When, having gotten up,
cleaned up and washed your garment, you had another attack on
the way back to the quarters, life tock on a very grim aspect
indeed. The whole process had to be done all over again. After
having had this happen to me three times during one very bad
night, I was returning along the path to the quarters. In
passing some other men in a hurry the other way, I slipped off
the path and sprawled in the mud. Discouraged, exhausted, and
sick, I lay there and cried until I got enough strength to pull
my mud-caked body back to quarters. Luckily during the rain that
afternoon, we had collected a supply of water, and I was able to
wash off.
It was moments like those I spent lying in that mud that
made me realize how easy it would be to just die and be rid of
all the pain and anguish. Never again, though, did I ever get to
that point where giving up seemed so desirable.
Wheeling and Dealing
In any social group, and especially in a "closed" one such
as ours was, there are those men who, by ability, inclination or
circumstances have a tendency to exploit their fellows.
It is not fair to say that this is always an evil course of
action, either. In any group there are always the foolish and
foolhardy. They will squander their capital be it food, money or
health. Then, too, there are the stupid and the uninformed who
by lack of ability or perception will end up with only a whistle
for their pig. At any rate, it is with these two groups that the
so-called "Big Operators” deal.
During the first days of prison camp there were some men
who by fair means or foul, wangled jobs as truck drivers,
orderlies for Japanese soldiers or obtained favorable positions
of one sort or another. As a result, they had access to a
greater food supply, surplus money or privileges. With these,
they sought to better their own comfort and position by barter
or trade with their fellow prisoners.
Such a one was Corporal Tanturri who was mentioned earlier.
In talking with the other boys of my old Air Corps outfit, I
discovered that, as far as they knew, I was the only man who had
ever been helped by Tanturri. This did not lessen my gratitude

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to him. It did make me more than ever aware of the inequalities
and injustices of prison camp. My first reaction to the news was
to call Tanturri in, chew him out, and return the money.
Instead, I decided to accept the gift and distribute it among
the boys myself. It was quite obvious that Tanturri had lived
well during his stay in the prison. He was as fat as a pig. His
bunk-mates told of extra food with every meal. They also told of
a very arrogant attitude with his less fortunate fellows. I was
distressed with the situation, which I had seen many times
before. Men can stand adversity far better than they can stand
prosperity.
Tanturri was a good boy. He had done an excellent job
during the siege of Clark Field early in the war. To see him
spoil that record by a disregard of his former buddies gave my
heart a wrench.
The American driver of a Japanese supply truck would
frequently be allowed contact with Filipino merchants. He could
purchase canned pilchards, corned beef, candy and eggs for small
sums. When he brought these into camp, they would sell at ten
times what he paid for them. A can of pilchards that cost 40
centavos on the outside market sold for up to eight pesos.
Cigarettes had an equal markup. Candy, eggs, jelly, and canned
goods of any sort were equally high priced.
Where did the money come from, you may ask. Oddly enough,
there always seemed to be quantities of money when there was
food to be sold. As our stay in the prison camp extended, it did
become scarce but in the early days, it was plentiful.
For one thing, some men had been paid in Philippine
currency during the Bataan and Corregidor campaign. Atone time,
the Filipino soldiers were paid several months wages. Some of
that money dribbled into American hands by the devious process
of the poker table or in games of Black Jack. At any rate,
though Americans and Filipinos were never in the same camps for
long, there was lots of money around.
Too, when the fall of Corregidor was almost a certainty,
the currency reserves of the Chase National Bank subsidiary in
Manila whose reserves had been brought to Corregidor, were
dumped into the ocean. The paper currency was cut up in a lavish
destruction program and also dumped. Not quite all the money got
into the ocean, though. So there was money to be spent. The
Japanese had confiscated most of these hoardings. What was left
seemed to circulate in camp with a speed that would warm any
economist's heart.
The "Big Operators" soon waxed rich. They had plenty to
eat, hired other prisoners to do their washing, care for their
personal needs and cook. Some called it the "same old American
way of free enterprise." In those early days of prison camp

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life, it was strictly "the cat with the longest claws” who
prospered. It is to the credit of our leadership that these
practices were brought under control within a year or so.
This matter of trading, buying, and selling and dickering
for all manner of food and clothing seemed to fill an emotional
as well as a physical need for most of the inmates of prison
camp.
At Camp O'Donnell, where I was sent after my release from
the hospital on Bataan, I got my first taste of wheeling and
dealing. There were 9,000 Americans in that camp. In another
area, separated by barbed wire was another camp of some 45,000
Filipino soldiers.
On my way to and from the river station, the Filipinos
asked many times, "Candy, cigarettes, food? We got plenty
money."
On the succeeding days at O'Donnell, I volunteered for
river duty. From my friends, bunkmates and acquaintances, I
gathered anything salable and took it with me. I had recognized
some of the men I had led on Bataan and they were anxious to buy
anything. With some judicious trading, I was able to build up a
fair sized bank roll against the day when I should have access
to a food supply.
That day was not long incoming. The American truck drivers
in camp brought in canned foods, fruits, and tobacco. Each night
we assembled in the "Thieves Market" for the big sales. It was
not a greatly different atmosphere from the Chicago Wheat Pit.
Everything was in demand. The prices were high and the bidding
brisk. I bought what I could at the best price available. The
next day I would resell to the Filipinos at a small profit and
try to keep enough to sweeten our own diet. By the time I left
O’Donnell I was able to pat my wallet and know that I had almost
100 pesos. It was a great source of confidence and comfort.
Later on, at the next prison camp, Cabanatuan, I was
quartered with six other officers. We formed a "pool" of money
and tried our hand at trading. Here, again, it was a precarious
business. I had a friend named Paul Saurwein, who had gotten a
job as truck driver for the Japanese. He had no money with which
to buy even should he get the chance. We were ready and willing
that he should use our money and split the loot with us.
Within the first days of his job, Paul was allowed to make
purchases from the Filipino merchants. He brought in some
wonderfully exciting stores. For a nominal price, we got canned
fish, jams, sugar, tea and coffee. It was our job, then, to sort
out the high protein and other nourishing food and sell the rest
at the high prison camp prices. In this way, we could recoup our
capital and continue to finance Saurwein, eat a little better
and smoke a few cigarettes.

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From my diary kept at the time, there is this entry for
Saturday, June 13, 1942:
"A sample of our purchase in order to get by. Though the
food was not very good today, some of our connections came
thru.
Bought 1 bottle catsup and 2 eggs 5.00--no good.
Sold 1 bottle catsup and 2 eggs 6.00--OK
Bought 1 can sardines and 1 cigarettes 5.00--OK
Bought 3 1/2 kilo sacks sugar 10.00--no good
Bought 1 1/2 kilo sack sugar 2.00--OK
Bought 3 cans sardines 7.00--OK
Sold 1 sardines and 2 sacks sugar 10.00--OK
Result 3 cans sardines to eat plus 2 sacks sugar-13.00
pesos with possible selling 2 cans sardines--10.00 pesos
leaving 1 sardines and 1 kilo sugar for 3.00 pesos. That is
a good day.”
At Bilibid, the Nips were allowing some coconuts and garlic
to be brought into the prison. Each man was allowed to buy a
certain number of each, provided he had the money. If he lacked
money, he could arrange with some loan shark to borrow money,
make the purchase, and turn half the food over to the lender.
This was an outrageous practice, but it was condoned. I would
loan the boys enough money to buy the food with the
understanding that they would sell one coconut on the prison
black market and retrieve the comparatively low cost for which
the Nips sold the nuts. He would then return the amount he had
been loaned so it could be loaned to another man.
In another case, I loaned one man money to gamble with.
This boy, Dorsett by name, loved to gamble. He had been denied
the privilege for some time. In addition, he was a good gambler.
My proposition to him was that he should take a certain amount
of money, gamble with it at the regular sessions held in the
corners of the prison cell blocks. If he lost then we both lost.
If he won, then he was to split the winnings with me. In that
way, I could keep a ready fund of money for the other boys who
were coming and going through the prison. Dorsett won. He won
very handsomely for a time, too. I got my money back but only
took a small percentage of profit on the deal. It had made me
very happy to see the new light the good fortune had kindled in
Dorsett's eyes. He had been down for a long time and his luck
was due for a change. It turned bad again within a few months
and he was killed when the ship he was traveling on to Japan was
sunk in the China Sea by an American submarine.
During this period, July, August, and September of 1944, we
did very well with our supplement of coconuts and garlic.
Coconuts were something I always felt were both good and
nourishing. Garlic was a new flavor for me. It did give a new

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taste to the rice and was touted to contain a good percentage of
ascorbic acid. A whole clove of garlic was just an average
portion with the evening rice. But good, but good!
My bunkmate, Jake Sawyer, was especially fond of garlic.
Jake, who was an M.D. in his home town of Brookline,
Massachusetts, was in the Navy as a line officer. He always said
he would rather be on the poop deck of a row boat than in the
best operating room of the land. Jake and I maintained a cordial
relationship though we never did get really chummy.
Along with its good organization, Bilibid Prison had
maintained some semblance of the military caste system. There
was little of the easy camaraderie of some of the other camps.
This, of course, had its good side as well as its bad. There was
here the return to the military hierarchy of command. I remember
a corpsman being punished for falling asleep on duty. Records of
derelictions of duty were kept for future reference. It was a
more forward looking program of military command than the one
mentioned earlier at Cabanatuan. During the early days there,
many men were tried by a duly constituted courts martial. The
sentences meted out were executed in a guardhouse within the
American compound. To withhold privileges and cut food rations
that were already murderously low was hardly good military
procedure under any circumstances. Many Americans received
sentences at Cabanatuan. I do not believe the practice lasted
long, however. There is another section on the iniquities of
this camp administration in its early days.
Though there was a more formal attitude at Bilibid, many of
my prewar buddies visited with me at the S. 0. Q. They had many
tales to tell. Some had been working at air strips in southern
Luzon. The going was so rough there that some of the boys
intentionally broke their arms or kneecaps to get a respite in
Bilibid.
One group of boys coming in one evening were merchants of a
sort. They had some sulfa pills they were trying to sell. Sulfa
was a scarce commodity in the Philippines. Most of that in stock
in Army and Navy pharmacies before the war had been ordered from
Winthrop Laboratories. It was distinguished by a big “W" on the
face of the pill. This “W" became such a symbol of effectiveness
to the Nips that they would not use sulfa unless it had that
distinguishing mark.
The visitors I spoke of that evening at Bilibid, had rigged
up a plaster cast and with a bare trace of sulfa, had concocted
a rice flour pill with something of the odor of sulfa. The big
“W" was emblazoned right across the face of the pill in most
authentic fashion. The pills brought fancy prices in trade from
Jap guards. The Nips used them as defense against venereal
disease. Of course, the rice flour pills were no defense at all,

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but they had the "W" inscribed thereon and that seemed
sufficient. Dr. Waterous told me that at least 60% of the
Japanese Army had some venereal disease.
The American prisoners who worked around these Japanese
guards all told different stories of their treatment. There were
cruel individuals among them. I heard much of "The White Angel"
of one labor camp. He was so-called because he wore the white
uniform of an officer of the Japanese marines. He must have been
a tough customer, for all who came in contact with him had a
healthy hate for all he stood for.
I imagine the boys who worked on some of these details paid
in kind for some of their ill treatment. Those Americans in the
motor pool performed small time sabotage every day they worked.
Restricting hydraulic lines was a favorite and sage trick to
work on Japanese rolling stock. The lines would carry enough
fluid for short operations. Under stress the oil or fluid would
not flow fast enough through the restricted lines and the engine
would freeze up. Putting sawdust in transmissions would quiet
them down, but burn them out in a hurry, too.
"Losing" just one small but important part of a machine was
another favorite trick of prisoners. The loss of a lathe gear or
face plate or chuck could make the whole piece of equipment
unusable. The Japanese, most of whom had little conception of
mechanics, had neither the mechanical background nor training to
repair their machines. There were expert Nips in the repair
shops, it is true, but the average Jap had little experience
with machinery.
CHAPTER XI
A PROMISE OF LIBERATION
The morning of September 22, 1944, came bright and clear to
Manila, hub of the Philippine Islands. The city was cool and
outwardly calm. Bilibid Prison, only a dozen blocks from the
heart of the Escolta, began to stir. The Japanese Army still
occupied Manila and some 800 American Army, Navy, and Marine
prisoners of war looked out at the 12 foot walls that surrounded
the cellblocks. Those walls were topped by a high, electricallycharged
wire fence. Japanese sentries paced the courtyard.
Machine guns pointed to the barred windows from the corner
watchtowers.
The gaunt-looking inmates who shuffled out into the yard on
their way to wash felt the slight morning chill and sought the
sunny paths across the yard. Most of them were crippled. They
were the amputees, the seriously wounded from the hills of
Bataan and slopes of Corregidor. These men had been captured

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over two years before and had known many prison camps. They had
lost many of their buddies to disease and malnutrition. They
were the remnants of 22,000 Americans who took the first brunt
of the Japanese invasion. Most of the able-bodied prisoners had
been evacuated to the home island or to Manchuria by the
Japanese.
Breakfast for the prisoners, three ounces of rice cooked
with copious amounts of water, was not due for another two
hours.
In the long, thick-walled stone cellblocks that housed the
sick officers, some of the men lay patiently on their wooden
benches and make-shift beds. Others were busy with cleaning the
area with crude brooms of rice straw. It was an ordinary routine
morning. The day was started as pleasantly as could be under the
circumstances and the prospect of the morning rice was enough to
lift the spirits. Men who had been through grimmer days by far,
knew that Bilibid was really a gravy train. There were also
heartening rumors. Word was leaking in that the Yanks were
really on the move.
Colonel William Waterous stepped outside to lay his blanket
over a bush to air. He looked up into the clean, clear sky
beyond the dirty walls. He saw two planes with unfamiliar,
stubby wings high in the sky. They did not look like the thinwinged
Japanese Zeros. They flew very close together, another
un-Japanese trait. Colonel Waterous turned to observe another
quarter of the sky. This time he saw, not two, but a formation
of 30 or more planes flying at about 10,000 feet. And then, as
though from nowhere came the sound of other formations. The
Colonel felt the blood pound in his temples.
"These are not the Nips," his reason told him. "Nip planes
and Nip maneuvers just don't call for this type of flying.”
And then Waterous saw what he had waited for almost three
years. The lead plane from those formations, seeming to know
unerringly just where it wanted to go, peeled off and started to
dive on the city and harbor. Waterous grabbed his tattered hat
and pulled it down on his head with both hands. The planes were
firing now and screaming with that shrill wail of propellers.
Waterous could see the bombs leave the wing racks and hear the
dull roar of their explosions. The sky seemed full of planes.
All now were diving, shooting, bombing. Over the harbor he could
see larger planes, ones that loosed torpedo-like projectiles
that sent shock waves clear to the prison yard.
Waterous was brushed inside the cellblock by men running
for cover. He saw a scene of wild jubilation. Some men were
crying for joy and others were clapping each other on the back.

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"The Yanks have come! The Yanks have come!" was on all
lips. These men had waited in pain and hunger for over two
dreary, death-stalked years for this moment.
Colonel Memory Kane leaped to the uppermost bars of the
shuttered windows above his pallet and peered through a crack.
“More of them are coming," he shouted, "I can see at least 80
from here."
And the Navy dive bombers kept coming all that morning.
They rocked the city from end to end. They screamed in over the
docked boats and the transports in the bay. They picked off the
Japanese antiaircraft guns one by one and bombed, seemingly, at
will. Flak rained down on the roofs of Bilibid Prison and spent
bullets ricocheted into the prison yard. There was no breakfast
for the men of Bilibid that morning.
As the black columns of smoke rose higher and higher, the
water supply dwindled. Power was shut off. One Japanese guard
was so frightened, he jumped, rifle and all, into a barrel half
full of rotting slop.
Not until afternoon did the Americans let up their fearsome
attack. The hunger-weakened men of Bilibid were exhausted from
the day's excitement. Some, with the memory of other bombings
still fresh in their minds, crawled out from under improvised
shelters. It is not easy to overcome the terror of the death
that rains from the sky.
The jubilant spirit that the attack had infused into the
weary men came out in the quiet whispers of little groups in the
darkness that night.
"I saw one dive so low he almost took the mast off a
transport out in the bay," said Jim Daly. "They didn't come in
at that ten-degree glide like the Nips," said another. "Those
guys came straight down and kept their nose on that target till
they could scratch the paint off with their fingernails."
Navy Lieutenant Jake Sawyer, of Brookline, Massachusetts,
who had both legs off up near the hips, lay back under his
mosquito bar and said quietly, "Now I am really going to begin
to think about going home."
And among those many men who had steeled themselves to the
privations inflicted by a harsh enemy, many a thought turned
once again to the very words they would say as they greeted
their loved ones.
Our big conjecture after the September 22 raid was quite
simple-- what would the Nips do now? They had obviously been
caught short. Aside from ack-ack fire, there had been no real
opposition to the diving, fire-spitting American fighters. The
toll in damage must have been terrific for smoke and fire filled
the Manila air. As the boys came in from Clark Field and other
installations where they had been working, they told the same

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story of little resistance to the furious onslaught. The antiaircraft
fire had been good, they said, but it was not enough to
cope with the number of attacking planes and the well-planned
surprise with which it was executed.
Clark Field, where I had been stationed before the war, had
been expanded by the Nips to encompass a much larger area of
both runway and parking rivetments. Planes were well-hidden by
thickets and brush cover. These planes were methodically picked
off by small groups of American fighters, demonstrating that
aerial photographs had been available to the pilots before their
briefing on the mission. None of the incoming men told of a
single Japanese plane being seen in aerial combat with American
planes.
As for Bilibid Prison, and the men there, many of us had
felt that old, numbing fear of bombs we had experienced during
the first months of the war when we had to take so many bombings
from the Japs. We knew it had to be, though, and we knew we
would take our chances with the rest. As we said all along, it
had to get worse before it got better.
New Arrivals
The first move by the Nips was apparent to us--the return
to Bilibid of all prisoners working outside the prison compound.
From them we got a well-rounded story of the extent of the raid
and the heavy damage. It was always the same--complete surprise
and careful, methodical demolition of most targets. We knew from
experience that a well-dug-in enemy can take a lot of aerial
pounding from light bombs, though. We had seen the Nips pound us
from the air hundreds of times and inflict comparatively little
damage. The holes in the runways can be filled in overnight.
Small field repair shops are usually well-hidden and can be
moved frequently. While aircraft are hard to hide and can be
damaged easily, they can also be repaired and new ones flown in.
At any rate, the Nips took a good pasting and we knew it. They
knew it even better than we did.
Within a few days of the raid, large groups of men were
brought into prison. That meant but one thing. The Nips were
going to try to get as many prisoners out of the Philippines as
possible. The prospect was not pleasant for any of us. If the
Americans could move carriers in close enough for a large scale
air strike, they would have had submarines in the vicinity for a
long time and in large numbers. Even well-convoyed ships are not
a difficult prey for a determined submarine captain. This fact
was borne out later when ships carrying Americans were sunk with
a loss of almost 3,000 lives.

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As I have said, the September 22 raid was only the
beginning. In the following days, we had about two air strikes a
week. They were characteristically vicious. The big, wooden
shutters over our barred windows banged with the concussions as
the bombs thundered close by. The rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun
fire was a feature of our daily lives. We knew the heavy thump
of the 50 caliber guns the Americans mounted. From certain
vantage points, the boys could watch the Yanks come screaming
down in their vertical dives on installations and boats in the
harbor. They could see the long, torpedo-like bombs passed out
of the line of vision. Something was taking a terrific amount of
damage. We were all quiet during these raids. There was no place
we could go. There was nothing we could do but sit and pray for
the good fortune of those men out there who were bringing us a
little nearer freedom with every pull of the bomb release
handle.
During this time some British prisoners who had been among
the thousands captured when Singapore fell in February of 1942,
were brought into Bilibid Prison. They were a sorry lot indeed.
Even by prison camp standards, most of them were small, frail
men. They had been on a ship headed for Japan when the Yankee
air strikes caught their ship in Subic Bay, close by Manila. The
ship was sunk and the survivors were picked up by Japanese
fishing boats. Many of them were wounded. All of them, perhaps
about 25% of those who started out from Singapore three months
before, were starved, dehydrated and clinging to life by Faith
alone.
A couple of these boys were assigned to work in our ward
when they were well enough to be about. They belonged to a
Highland Scotch Regiment. They told of their trip out to the Far
East just prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The initial
stage of the sea voyage was made in a British ship to Nova
Scotia. There, with much secrecy, they were trans-shipped aboard
a fast American trooper for the trip around Cape Horn to the
Malay Peninsula. They were not seasoned troops and what training
they got was mostly on the long voyage through tropic seas. They
heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while they were
still at sea. By the time they landed in Singapore, the Nips had
begun the siege of that supposedly impregnable fortress. No one
with any basic knowledge of aerial warfare really thought
Singapore was invasion-proof. It had good location in it s
favor, but that was about all. Like Corregidor, it was built for
a siege by battleship. Air power nullified its usefulness. This
last batch of Britishers landed during a full-fledged Japanese
bombing raid. They were rushed to the fighting front up the
Malay Peninsula. Most of the rest of the 25 or so days they
lasted was spent in withdrawing as the Nips made landings in

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behind them. Many of these boys never saw an enemy or ever fired
a shot. When they were all holed-up on the island fortress, the
Nips merely cut off the water supply from the mainland and
issued an ultimatum.
Our new arrivals told us that many groups of British and
native prisoners were taken up the peninsula to work on rail
lines being cut through the jungle. They told stories of whole
camps of these men being wiped out by cholera. They also told of
a high percentage of deaths from infectious diseases, such as
dysentery. Singapore is almost on the equator. It is sticky hot
all year round. Apparently a more virulent form of infection was
rampant in the southern prisons than in ours for almost any
wound or injury necessitated the eventual amputation of the
affected limb. Without satisfactory operating methods, at hand,
the death to all from these operations was high.
I enjoyed talking with these British boys. They had arrived
at an emotional equilibrium that considered their plight as
something quite normal. That is why they had survived their
ordeal perhaps. When I spoke a few pages back of the 21 day trip
we had up from Mindanao, I did so with the realization that it
would have killed men less used to privation and less welladjusted
to meeting such a situation. These Britishers came to
Bilibid Prison off a boat that had been underway for ninety
days.
There just seems to be something in some men that enables
them to survive such an ordeal. That does not mean to say that
all men who do survive have a tremendous strength of character
or deep emotional reserve. There was at least one man in that
group of Britishers who was a rat. He was just no good-thieving,
lying, cheating example of a human being. His
characteristics became apparent after he was in our midst only a
few days. This man's fellows told us, after we had expressed
doubts as to his trustworthiness, that it had been the same, old
story for the past several years. The boy had, it seems, certain
ingrained dishonest characteristics that alienated him from all
with whom he came in contact. It was this boy who stole a
mosquito bar from me one day and tried to sell it in a cellblock
down the line for the then going price of 200 pesos. I got a
line on just who the thief had been by a report from friends
that a Britisher had such an article for sale. On examination,
it turned out to be my bar and it was retrieved. No action was
taken against the Britisher and I relate the incident only to
show that men's bad qualities as well as their good seem to stay
with them under adverse as well as desirable conditions.
Most of these Englishmen were fine boys and we enjoyed
swapping stories about the war with them.

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There was another incident that comes to mind involving the
theft of a pair of shoes by an American. Suspicion pointed to
one particular man. He denied any implication. For lack of
evidence no action was taken. The suspected man, however, was
watched. In the early hours of the morning, before daylight, he
was seen leaving the barracks. He pulled a package of some sort
out from a hiding place and carried it to the latrine. Then he
came away with no package.
All this was duly reported to the barracks leader. The man
finally confessed to the theft and said he knew he would be
found out in time, so he had thrown the shoes into the latrine.
It was decided that he must retrieve the shoes. Two men held him
by the heels, head down, over the pit while he groped in the
excrement till he located the shoes. Then with water and some
coarse week as a scrub brush, he was required to clean the shoes
and return them to their rightful owner.
To have turned the man over to the Japanese would mean
severe punishment and time in the guardhouse. By taking care of
our own discipline problems, we neither betrayed our men to
physical violence or starvation in confinement.
Let me mention here some of the elements of my deep concern
over the loss of a mosquito bar. Part of that concern was the
memory of malaria and dengue fevers that had come my way despite
the protective covering the bar afforded. I did sleep many
nights without the protection of a bar. There were nights when I
was too exhausted to care or be bothered by mosquito. It was
something like the times when the water ran low. I, along with
many another, lay right down in the roadway and drank deeply of
any moisture that remained in the tire ruts of the road. Like
the narrator in Kipling's Gunga Din, I felt those were the
finest drinks I ever drank. It might have been smelly, it might
have been muddy, it might have been full of amoebic dysentery,
but it was wet. When a man is really thirsty, he wants water and
he is not choosy just where it comes from nor how he gets it.
It is the same way with sleep. When a man is utterly
exhausted he can lie down on the hardest ground, concrete, or
bramble and sleep like a baby.
Sleeping in the tropics under more normal conditions was
different. When necessity demanded it, we could sleep fitfully
without a bar. In the first place, we would lie down fully
clothed. We would pull a pair of sox up over our pant legs to
protect the lower extremities. We would pull another pair of sox
over our hands. A towel or piece of cloth would protect our head
as much as possible. This piece of cloth we would pull down over
our faces and tuck into our buttoned shirt collars, making us,
for all the world, like hooded men. In that tropic atmosphere,
one had to let the hot body breath out to keep from smothering.

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I remember one time when I had some brushless shaving cream and
smeared that over my nose to keep the mosquitoes away from the
only exposed part of my face. During the night even those
precautions would not account for the twisting and turnings of
the body during sleep. The mosquitoes would sometimes pierce
right through a thin shirt or piece of cloth. Those buzzing
pests were mighty hungry. At any rate, a mosquito bar was a most
desirable and valuable possession.
I want to get back to the subject of two other men who were
brought by the Nips into our cellblock soon after the initial
September raid. They were American civilians. They were gaunt,
grey men, obviously just out of close confinement. The ashen
color and subdued manner, their habit of standing for long
periods staring into space, gave us the clue to their past. When
I talked to one of them, he told me the story.
They were both mining engineers working on a small island
south of Luzon when the war broke out. They headed north to
volunteer in the defense of the Philippines. Though they were
employed by the army in demolition work in an effort toward
delaying the Japanese Army, they never had an opportunity to get
sworn in as officers of the service. When the rest of the
American and Filipino forces withdrew into Bataan, these men
were cut off id southern Luzon. They got away in a small boat
and managed to make a landfall on a small island in the Visayan
group between Luzon and Cebu. Here they were contacted by
Filipino guerrilla forces and enlisted in carrying on espionage
work in conjunction with a colonel of the Philippine Army.
Their job, according to the prisoner I talked with, was to
receive the coded messages on a piece of paper from a courier,
transmit it over the portable radio to Australia and the
MacArthur headquarters.
The natives on the island were friendly. There were no
Japanese troops in the vicinity and their operations were, to
all intents and purposes, very successful. The Japanese, of
course, were monitoring the station, trying to pick the code.
After a year or so of gathering coded messages, the Nips moved
in and captured the two Americans. It is reasonable to assume
that if the Nips had been able to break the code, they would
have let the station continue. As it was then, the Japs must
have not been able to read the messages and moved in on the
transmitter in an effort to get the Americans to read the
messages. The Americans, who received the messages written out
for them had no more knowledge of what was being sent than the
Japs.
After threatening sudden and violent death, the Nips gave
the Americans the alternative of breaking the code. For months
the Nips brought them messages, interrogated them endlessly,

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threatened them constantly. My friend, the prisoner, told me he
and his partner worked night and day in an effort to understand
the system used in the American code and even after a year, had
arrived at no more a solution than had the Nips. The Nips,
evidently were finally convinced that they had missed the right
parties when they picked up the two engineers. The men were
brought to Manila where they were lodged first in Fort Santiago
prison and then at Bilibid. Their cell was a small, barred room
with only partial sunlight during the day. There, for over a
year, they lived together close by the execution chamber.
For some reason, they were lodged in the S.O.Q. of the
prison where I was billeted the day after the first big American
raid. From their attitude of standing silently for hours at a
time, we knew they had not been among their own kind for many
months. Within a week, these two unfortunate prisoners were
removed from our cellblock. We never saw them again. I learned
from the wife of one of them that they were executed before a
firing squad on Christmas Eve, 1944.
As the days passed after the first big raid, men were
brought in from the small detachments around the islands. Those
who came in from Corregidor gave us firsthand accounts of the
masts of sunken ships they were able to perceive in the harbor
and bay. Those brought in from a work party at Clark Field told
of the thoroughness of the raid there. The miles and miles of
runways and taxi lanes the Nips had developed during the two
year interval of their stay had met with much devastation. Those
from Cabanatuan told of one bomber, a Jap, flying at low
altitude in an effort at escaping unnoticed by the diving, potshotting
Americans. The Nip was discovered by an American
fighter close by the prison compound and quite unceremoniously
shot down. The damaged Jap made a crash landing within a few
yards of the prison wire to the cheers of the assembled inmates.
They even told us of the stern reprimands the guards of
the camp received when they fired on the low-flying fighter as
he came down to survey his kill.
Prison guards, it seems, were for guarding prisoners, not
for fighting the enemy.
Back at Bilibid, we could tell by the actions of the guards
that they knew the time had come to call it quits.
Our problems as prisoners were somewhat multiplied now, as
well. Large groups of men were being brought in for immediate
transfer to Japan. The food supply became less regular and
poorer in quality. Many of the camp guards were removed to join
the defense forces of the island. Machine guns were set up
covering the compound walkways. Rules were tightened with a
rigid enforcement promised. The pressure was on and we knew it.
We knew it from the sounds of moving tanks and trucks during the

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night hours. We knew it from the grimness of the orders that
were issued. The prospect of men leaving by ship for Japan under
the bombs of our own planes was a very discouraging thought. We
did the only thing we could do. We sat and waited as calmly as
we could.
Just what the Nips had in store for those of us in a
disabled condition was a handy worry to distract us. We knew
they might do something rash, but we could do nothing but wait
and see.
As the raids went on at intervals of two to three days, we
grew more confident of the American superiority. At no time was
an enemy plane observed ready to give combat. The fighters
screamed in to pick off gun emplacements. Targets seemed to have
been carefully chosen. There was no indiscriminate bombing, else
we would have taken at least a few hits. All around the prison
we could hear the detonation of bombs and see the smoke of
fires.
Ill Fated Prison Ships
In October, a boatload of prisoners was taken out. Many of
the men from my prewar outfit, the 7th Materiel Squadron, were
on that boat. They were torpedoed in the South China Sea and,
according to reports received a year later, only four out of the
1,600 men survived.
As soon as this draft was out of the way, another grouping
of prisoners was started. All the well and ambulatory cases in
camps on Luzon were gradually assembled at Bilibid Prison and
readied for the trip to Japan. By November, 1944, the draft was
ready to leave. As fast as ships were brought into the harbor to
take them out, the Yanks would sink them. It was not until
December 13, 1944, that they were loaded aboard the Oroku Maru
and started on their tragic voyage.
Officers who survived the trip and returned to the States
have assisted in compiling this general summary for the benefit
of the relatives of men who did not survive. The sequence of
events has been checked by numerous men and to the best of my
knowledge is accurate in its chronology. Specific information on
individuals has been very difficult to determine. The congestion
of the holds of the ships, the darkness, the confusion incident
to such a catastrophe make it almost impossible to give any true
picture.
This last group of 1,619 men and officers was lined up for
final inspection and marched off. The physical condition of many
of the men was very poor. All of the men were thin. The ration
of 200 grams of rice a day for the past month or more had
weakened their already undernourished bodies. Beri-Beri was the

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most common ailment. The men marched to the docks some eight
blocks from Bilibid Prison and were immediately led aboard the
Oroku Maru.
The boat was a typical Japanese troopship, littered with
lines and gear and with a jerry-built latrine constructed over
one side. The holds were filthy with the scum of thousands of
sweating bodies they had carried. The allotted space left no
room for movement. Most personal needs were cared for in fivegallon
cans.
These men had known such conditions before, and they took
their places in a numbed silence. Manila had been bombed for
over two months and the Americans had no way of knowing that
Yank prisoners were being moved aboard this armed vessel. The
Oroku Maru was equipped with three 75 mm antiaircraft guns,
several 40 mm, 20 mm and banks of antiaircraft machine guns. The
foreboding thought of walking aboard a deathtrap of this sort to
be locked in a dark and crowded hold unleashed overpowering
fears in the men.
The trip started in the evening in convoy with several
other ships. Its route was out past Bataan where most of the men
had put up such a gallant fight almost three years before. They
sailed close by Corregidor, about 0800 the morning of the 14th,
where others now watched the sea approaches to Manila. All these
things were hidden to those men in the hold where congestion was
so great that during the night of the 13th a number of men died
of suffocation. When the clatter of antiaircraft fire broke out
above, they shuddered in fearful anticipation. Explosions soon
rocked the ship, the 50 caliber bullets from the attacking dive
bombers pierced the shell-like plates. The heavier detonations
seemed to lift the whole boat from the water. The convoy headed
back in shore, this time for Subic Bay on the other side of the
Bataan peninsula, and the attackers pounded it unmercifully.
With a grating, tearing noise the boys below heard the bottom
come to rest on the gravel beach. The attackers flew off and the
men began to count their dead and wounded. All night long the
suffering men lay untended except for what small aid the doctors
were able to give. Fear and thirst crazed. Men prayed and fought
by turns. It was a nightmare only the fiendish sadism of the
Japanese would permit to continue. Many more men died that night
from suffocation, wounds, suicide and with the dawn of the 15th,
new fears became apparent. The dive bombers were out for an
early kill. They renewed their bombing. One of the bombs took
effect on the fantail of the ship, blowing in the aft hold and
killing 100 or more prisoners. The Japanese guards ordered
everyone over the side and to the beach. The strafing planes
then were able to identify the white men and held their fire.
They destroyed the ships, but did not strafe the Americans in

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the tennis court compound where they had been herded. The toll
so far had been 277 officers and men. Two men escaped at this
juncture and were able, with the help of natives, to join the
American forces on Leyte.
After four days in the confines of the tennis court with
little food and constant harassment from aircraft, the pitiful
group was shunted by truck to San Fernando in Pampanga Province,
a trip of 70 kilometers. From this point, on December 24, 1944,
they were loaded into box cars for San Fernando La Union, a
northerly port on Lingayen Gulf.
On the 27th of December, 1944, the men were loaded aboard a
recently emptied horse transport. The crowded filth by this time
made little impression on the benumbed minds. The small convoy
headed out into the China Sea for Taiwan (Formosa). As they
neared the coast of China, the weather changed and cold was
added to their miseries. Some place along the line, an explosion
rocked the ship but she continued on course. Arriving in Tacao
Harbor, Formosa, on the 31st of December, 1944, the boat was
laid to for repairs to the rudder damaged in the unidentified
explosion. For several days the men were confined to their black
hole. The occasional man allowed topside could see hundreds of
cargo and war boats at anchor. The harbor was a lush target and
on January 9, a few China-based bombers made a reconnaissance
raid. One of the bombs landed just a few feet off the forward
hold where 500 men were housed. The blast tore open the side of
the ship killing several hundreds. The devastation was increased
by the falling beams. The men were kept in the holds at bayonet
point and none left the ship.
After 13 days, on the 13th of January, another boat was
readied and the thousand odd men were put aboard and sailed on
the 14th. This boat was loaded with sugar and some found its way
into the hungry hands. Water was limited at times to half a cup
a day. Rice was very scanty. The strain of fatigue, the lack of
medical care began to take the men, first by two's and three's
and then by ten's and twenty's. Less than 500 survived to reach
Japan. Men who had fought the good fight for three years went
down to half their normal weight. The gaunt apathy of hunger,
the stark realism of fear, the utter lassitude of fatigue made
dying the easy way. Yet these men would not give up. Many of
them died in their sleep and found surcease from pain and
chilling cold.
Why will men endure under conditions such as these? The
answer is not easy. Each thinks tomorrow may be better. Each day
of living renews the will to live. It is hard to die and waste
those previous days of suffering. Then, there is that big factor
back home. Wives, families, sweethearts, make for the strength
of ten. The courage and faith they send is often the difference

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between life and death. Some men will pray and some men will be
profane, but no man forgets his loved ones at home nor fails to
cling to the ties of family.
After 16 tortuous days the sugar boat disgorged its
cadaverous cargo on the 30th of January, 1945, at Mojim, Japan-only
half as many as started from Tacao and one third of those
that left Manila 49 days before. Later, after their release from
prison camp, the men were informed that only a matter of hours
after their departure, a heavy B29 raid had destroyed over
100,000 tons of shipping in Tacao harbor.
The new camp at Fukuoka, Japan, was a typical Japanese
prison camp. The barbed wire enclosure, the poor shacks, the
lack of sanitary facilities, and insufficient water and food.
From January 30 to April 16, 1945, the men regained a little
strength and then were issued a few clothes for another trip. By
rail across Japan, they headed for Fukuoka Harbor, The
relentless Japanese, knowing an invasion was imminent, were
moving the men to Korea. They embarked from Fukuoka Harbor on a
fast ferry and after eight hours landed at Pusan, Korea.
The intense cold of the Northern latitudes caused much
suffering in spite of the few scanty woolen clothes the men had
by this time. Snow and sleet storms had been regular over the
last phases of the trip.
From Pusan, Korea, a group of men were sent to Mukden,
Manchuria, where several P.O.W. camps had been established some
three years before. The balance (150) were sent to Jinsen,
Korea.
We, who were left in Bilibid Prison, had heard of the
landings of the Americans at Leyte. Each night we heard the Jap
planes roar out to inflict what damage they could on the fleet.
It was at Leyte that the real effort of the Kamakazi or crashdiving
pilots came to fruition. Only the commanders knew how
close our fleet was to a withdrawal.
We were exuberant over the news of the invasion and
believed Luzon was next on the list. We were wrong. In a
skillful bit of diversionary maneuvering, General MacArthur sent
a small force to make a landing on the island of Mindoro at the
southern tip of Luzon. In their mad rush to defend Mindoro, the
Nips diverted much of their armor and many of their men to the
south, thus exposing them to air attack by American planes as
they traveled. Then, with well-executed marshaling of forces,
the main body of American troops moved in on Lingayen Gulf, the
natural avenue of approach to Manila. The Japs had used Lingayen
Gulf to make their big landing. It afforded a broad route to
Manila. The forces commanding that valley of rice lands also cut
the strategic island in two parts, thus separating the defending

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forces. The Japanese now had to move their armor north once
more, again exposing it to air attack.
We could pick out land-based bombers in the attack
formations now. They were four-engine Liberators. We knew that
large air strips were in use at or near Leyte. We also knew the
weather had contrived against the Americans.
We did not know about the deep mud of Leyte till later, but
we did know that at least three typhoons struck between the time
of the Leyte landing and the Lingayen Gulf landing. The typhoon
season was at its height but to get three of the howlers was
unfortunate. In Manila, we got only the tail end of these. They
were bad enough even there. The winds would howl and the rain
came down in torrents. Debris filled the yard and dampness lay
heavy in our hearts for the boys who had to live and fight in
the midst of these terrors. The typhoons accomplished what the
Nips had not been able to do with their murderously accurate
antiaircraft fire--they stopped the raids on Manila for almost
three weeks. At the very end of this time, the Japs moved the
last boatload of American prisoners out of the islands. It was
this ship, the Oroku Maru, of which I have talked.
I do not know just where the news came from, but we heard
amazingly accurate details of the Leyte and Lingayen operations.
Of course, we did not know they were accurate at the time and
discounted much of the story. There was a secret radio in
Bilibid Prison, but only a few men knew of its existence. The
news was picked up from KGEI, San Francisco. This information
was let out only very sparingly, of course. In a matter of days,
it would filter down to my level. My bunkmate, Commander Alan
McCracken, being senior Naval officer in the Philippines, did
receive much of this news. It was he who would lean over late at
night and tell me a few details of what had come in that day.
From others, I would get additional stories. The tempo of the
air raids increased with the use of land-based planes and,
within a short time, we could see the flash of artillery pieces
off in the northern sky. We would count the seconds between the
flash of the gun and the detonation to estimate the approximate
distance. The interval between flash and sound became shorter
each day.
Whether this landing came before the first of 1945 or not,
I cannot remember. At any rate, we had something of a gala
occasion at Christmas. The Nips put out all the packages from
home that had not been distributed. That is, some of these men
had died or had not been brought into Bilibid. The clothes and
food stuffs were pooled and distributed to the wards in
accordance with the number of men quartered in each. We drew
lots as had always been our custom. There was tobacco, dried
soups, articles of clothing. The Japs even gave us an extra bag

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of rice to cook for the 400-odd men in the prison, I believe.
The galley had been holding back on rice to give a bigger
portion for the holiday meal.
After Christmas, the storms continued and we settled down
to wait. It was not an easy wait either. One disturbing thought
lay in the back of the minds of each of us. What would the Nips
do to us noncombatants when the Yanks really put the pressure on
the gates of Manila? We knew their capacity for sudden and
violent destruction of human life. We knew from the British
prisoners that they had run amuck through the hospitals of
Singapore. We knew they had shot surrendering prisoners during
the capitulation of Bataan merely to get them out of the way.
Under the stress of circumstances would they dispose of us in
the same manner? This was the chance we knew about and calmly
waited for the Japanese to decide. We had no other course.
It had come to us through the grapevine that during their
demolition work in the city of Manila, the Japs had invited some
of the Filipino residents of the city to enter one of their
storehouses and carry off the remaining food before the building
was destroyed. While the Filipinos were massed in the building,
the charges were set off killing and maiming hundreds. We also
heard the Japs had planted demolition charges in and around one
of the famous Catholic churches in the city and blown it up
during a worship service. Just how authentic stories like these
were, we could not tell, but we needed no coaching to believe
they had the capacity for such acts.
During the nights after the first of January, 1945, we
heard sporadic rifle fire in the streets. The tempo of the
bombings increased. Every day flights of heavy, land-based
Liberators flew over. The antiaircraft fire was intense. On one
occasion, Lieutenant Jim Daly told me he saw the wing shot right
off one of our planes. The interconnecting runways and the
takeoff strips the Japanese had constructed out of Dewey Blvd.
close to the heart of the city were under constant bombing and
strafing attack.
Inside the prison the atmosphere was optimistic. Through
the Japanese and through the American administration within the
walls, we were cautioned against any overt acts that might be
construed as provocative. The Nips posted orders to the effect
that rules would be stringently enforced. Some of the guards
became very touchy about being saluted. Slaps were meted out to
those who neglected this formality. Failure to bow to a guard if
the head was uncovered was another cause for corporal
punishment.
It was for this reason that many Americans kept a hat handy
when they were outside. The thought of bowing to a Japanese
soldier was one of the most distasteful to an American. To the

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Japanese, it was a very normal salutation, such as an American
waving of the hand.
I have not mentioned much of the Japanese military
formality so far. It was a most complex series of bowings and
hissings and doing complicated movements by the numbers. A
simple thing like the changing of a guard consisted of several
minutes of heel-clicking, rifle-presenting, and hissing sounds
as the sentries sucked in their breath during the bows from the
waist. The sunrise formations at which the entire garrison lined
up and greeted the sun with a sort of chant was most impressive.
To these little yellow men the flag was nothing. Their symbol of
power was the Emperor and they fervently seemed to worship him.
One of the great sources of strength of General MacArthur was
his calculated program of enhancing his own name and personal
prestige.
He fostered this aura of omniscience and infallibility as a
calculated policy. He centered the attention of the Peoples of
the Orient and especially the Filipinos on General Douglas
MacArthur, the Great Soldier. This was no idle gesture of
vanity. Its purpose was to consolidate, solidify, strengthen the
Philippine determination to resist under their great leader.
It might be said that MacArthur could have built up the
image of President Queson to the same end. Not so. President
Queson was an old, weak and facile man with many enemies both in
and out of the Philippines. The one symbol of power was the
great military hero sent by the greatest nation on Earth, the
United States, to save the Philippines and that figure was
General Douglas MacArthur.
I well remember getting back to Regimental command on one
occasion and seeing a notice nailed to a tree. It read: "IT HAS
COME TO THE ATTENTION OF THIS COMMAND HEADQUARTERS THAT
COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE POOR QUALITY OF FOOD, THE INADEQUATE SUPPLY
SYSTEM, THE HARDSHIPS OF THE CAMPAIGN HAVE BEEN VOICED BY
MEMBERS OF THE TROOPS UNDER MY COMMAND.
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE LOT OF SOLDIERS TO SUFFER HARDSHIP
AND PRIVATION, HUNGER AND WANT. IN THE FUTURE, THERE WILL BE NO
MORE COMPLAINTS OF THIS NATURE."
Under the order was scrawled in that well known hand only
the words "MacArthur."
I laughed at this bit of whimsy, thinking it some sort of
joke. Most American soldiers whose prerogative to gripe was
ingrained, would have also laughed.
I found out later, however, that the Filipino soldiers took
the order to heart. There was far less dissatisfaction and
outward complaint after that. The great leader had spoken and
the word was law.

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I do not know that the pronouncement did a great deal of
good but the power and prestige of General MacArthur was
demonstrated once again.
In the Orient, this was a very strategic policy. The idea
of the great, all-powerful ruler attracted the masses. Diffuse
allegations to the principles of democracy meant nothing to a
people who hardly knew a full belly all their lives. The name of
a man who could feed them or starve them, give them life or
death, feed their egos or banish them to lives of misery was
what the Orientals looked up to. The Japanese Emperor had been
deified by the political machine that ran Japan. MacArthur had
developed somewhat the same formula during his stay in the East.
The first days of 1945 went noisily on. The tension mounted
with each hour. The noise of demolition increased. Rumors flew
in from all directions. The Japs were going to abandon Manila as
a battle field. The Japs were going to make a stand in Manila to
the last man. The Japs were going to put up merely a delaying
action while they withdrew into Bataan and put up their fight
there. The rain had so bogged the American forces down they had
run out of supplies. The Americans were moving faster and with
less opposition than they had expected.
We had learned to take all this sort of news with a nod and
a shrug. Some of it we knew must be true; some of it had to be
pure rumor.
I never did learn to take the heavy detonations of the
bombing raids with complete ease. Thoughts of the many days and
nights of bombs early in the war were very much alive in my
memory. I believe we all tried to keep uppermost in our minds
that this was the moment when conditions had to be worse before
they improved. When we jokingly asked for the "odds" now, the
boys would say, "Oh, maybe 40 to 60." This meant we were going
through a rugged period. The chances were only about 40% that we
would come through. Before this, we had varied from 30 to 70
during the boat trips to 40 to 50 during lulls in our existence.
We seldom figured our chances were better than 50 to 50.
CHAPTER XII
LIBERATION
On the night of February 3, 1945, we were awakened by the
thundering sound of heavy treaded vehicles outside the walls of
the prison. And for the first time in several years we heard the
solid thump, thump, thump of 50 caliber machine guns. We knew,
then, the Yanks had arrived. The Nips didn't have any 50 caliber
guns. They used either the light 25 caliber or the heavy 20 mm
cannon.

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There was an air of authority about the way those tanks
wheeled, thundered, screeched and blasted. We could actually
feel the confidence with which experienced soldiers performed a
mission. For an hour, the tanks alternately raced around the
walls and came to a screeching stop to fire with more accuracy.
The heavy boom, boom of the 105 cannon, the main battery of the
tank arsenal, was a most reassuring sound. We knew the Yanks had
come and with a vengeance. Just what the Americans would do and
what the Nips would do now was buried in the thought that they
had actually arrived.
The next day about noon the Nips posted an order. It was
read to prisoners in each cellblock. The Japanese Army, it said,
was freeing the American prisoners of their own free will. The
guards were being withdrawn. Three days food was to be left in
the storehouse. Prisoners were warned that it would be dangerous
to leave the confines of the prison walls.
We had not really expected this. It meant the Nips were not
going to put up a fight in the prison yard. Fires were blazing
on three sides of the prison walls and the Nips knew if they did
not get out they could be trapped easily. The senior American
officers cautioned us to stay close by our quarters. We would
have our regular ration of food. Water would be drawn in all
containers in the event of a stoppage of the supply. We would
husband our resources, slim though they be, and prepare to hold
out till the American troops arrived.
I had spent 1,031 days as a prisoner of war. The feeling of
liberty was strange. Just what the future had in store for all
of us did not matter so much though we all knew we were not out
of the woods by far. We were, by the act of being freed,
eligible targets for the Japanese once again. We felt we would
take our chances, though.
Sounds of conflict outside the prison walls stepped up
during the day. The sound of 105 mm cannon fire was very close
now. The clump, clump of 50 caliber machine gun fire was
frequent. We just sat tight and waited. Some sniper bullets
ricocheted off the stone walls inside the yard and the inmates
ventured out at their risk.
Towards evening a lull developed in the small arms fire
though the flames and smoke arising from three sides of the
prison seemed to increase. Then it happened.
One man described it thus: "A few of us were standing near
one of the boarded-up gates when a heavy pounding came from
outside. Finally the wood gave way and a rifle barrel came
cautiously through along with a helmet. It was a funny, bucket
shaped helmet but the face under that helmet looked like it was
from Kansas. This Joe sees us prisoners standing there and says,
‘What the hell are you guys doing here?’ Well, we just stand

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there and stare, not knowing what to say. Finally, one of our
guys says 'Who are you anyway?' Well, this here guy, who looks
like he's from Kansas, says he's a member of the 7th Cavalry,
U.S. Army.
"It was kind of hard to believe our eyes, but we all had
the same question to ask him. If he was an American soldier, did
he have an American cigarette? And if he had an American
cigarette, then how's about one.”
The 7th Cavalry unit that stumbled onto the prison was one
assigned a task of establishing a bridgehead on the Passig
River. They were only making a routine check of their route when
they kicked in that boarded up gate. They were a tough looking
lot. Their days since the landing at Lingayen Gulf had been
spent in marching and fighting all the 300 kilometers from the
Gulf of Manila. They were lean and hard. They threw a perimeter
guard around the prison walls and set up a protective fire
against snipers. They shared their rations with the prisoners
and assured them that there was a big army moving in for the
last big battle of the Philippines. That battle would have to be
fought right in the city of Manila. The Nips had no place to go
and nothing to go in. They had a city of stone buildings to
fight in and apparently a lot of ammunition. No one was there to
deny it would be a rough go.
What amazed us most about the 7th cavalry contingent was
their apparent youthfulness, their new helmets, which we had
never seen before, and their combat uniforms that resembled the
dungarees we wore before the war. The carbines they carried were
an entirely new development. The number and variety of grenades,
knives, pistols and other combat equipment they carried
astounded us all.
These boys had been marching and fighting more than 15
miles a day since they landed at Lingayen Gulf three weeks
before. They looked and were a tough, wiry, determined bunch.
They had outrun their supply train but they shared what small
rations they had with us. We went to bed that night with a
prayer of thankfulness on every lip and in every heart. There
was no count that evening or ever again for the 400 military
prisoners.
I soon learned many things about the prison that I had
never known. There were some 800 civilian prisoners in another
section of the big enclosure. We had been found quite by
accident. Santo Tomas, the civilian internment camp close by
Bilibid, had been liberated by another task force only the night
before we were sprung. In that "freeing” process, the Nip guards
had holed up on the third floor of Santo Tomas, holding a group
of civilian prisoners hostage. The task force commander had made
a deal with the Japanese for safe escort to the Japanese lines

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in exchange for the safe delivery of the hostages. It seems the
safe conduct was carried out to the appointed spot. In the
meantime, Filipino guerrillas had moved in and were in command
of the area. The Japanese contingent was either captured or
killed and the Japanese commander was brought back to Santo
Tomas, tried by a court martial, and shot.
Many of these stories that came to us were only halftruths.
The ones I cannot vouch for I have tried to label as
rumor or hearsay.
At any rate, those of us at Bilibid Prison woke up to a new
world the morning of February 5, 1945. We had only a normal rice
ration for breakfast but, on the assurance of the Americans that
food was on the way, the number of meals was raised from two to
three a day.
All this time the fires were getting closer and closer to
the prison walls. After dark that evening, we were notified to
prepare to move. There were wild rumors connected with this,
too.
One report said a large quantity of gasoline was stored in
one of the prison courtyards. A spark from the fires would be
sufficient to make a holocaust of the place. Another rumor had
it that a Japanese courier had been intercepted by American
troops. He was carrying orders to the Bilibid Prison guard to
mine and destroy the prison with all inmates.
Just what the reasons we were ready and willing to move.
Each of us had made preparations weeks before. Doc Sawyer and I
had spent some time in getting a set of clothes together for
just this occasion. Each of us had stitched and examined
carefully, a strong bag to carry our personal possessions. With
the move order ringing in our ears, we turned to and followed
our prearranged plan for evacuation. Only the most important
items could be carried.
Doc Sawyer, the bilateral amputee, used his low, fourwheeled
platform to wheel himself out as far as possible. There,
a couple of men picked him up and carried him out the prison
walls to a waiting Jeep. I went in the wheel chair assisted by a
couple of other prisoners until the going got too rough. To me
there was a tremendous thrill at leaving the prison grounds.
Going through the gates was like throwing off a heavy burden. I
saw parts of the big compound I had not heard about. I saw more
clearly the devastation of the city. I was taken through the
milling throng of civilian prisoners who had been brought in not
long before by the Japanese from Baguio, the mountain prison
where they had been interned for over two years. The sight of
women and children was a heartening one.
I have very little knowledge of the number of civilian
prisoners taken by the Japanese in the Philippine Islands during

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the War. I am making only an educated guess when I say it was
probably several thousand. These civilians, women, children and
nonmilitary men were put under a Japanese civilian
administration and were never a part of the military camps until
late in the War. Some civilians were quartered at Baguio, a
mountain resort in Northern Luzon. Some were housed at Santa
Tomas University, not far from Bilibid Prison. A few were
repatriated on the Swedish ship, Gripsholm, in exchange for
Japanese being held in the United States. Beyond these sketchy
details and a few stories told me by a couple of the prisoners
themselves, I knew nothing of Civilian internees.
They all seemed in a rather subdued but happy mood. That
is, there was a seriousness and yet a happiness about the whole
procedure. Those resolute parents who had children to care for
deserve great commendation for their self-effacement and good
care of their offspring. In a situation where the natural bent
is toward self-preservation, these parents were required to
reorient their basic drives and look mainly to the welfare of
the young.
Goodbye to Bilibid Prison
A row of Jeeps, command cars and ambulances was waiting in
the street outside the prison walls. I was laid upon a litter
and perched across the hood of one of the Jeeps. The procession
began to move slowly down the street between lines of waving
Filipinos. The distinct possibility of ambush did not enter my
mind at the time. Our medics even carried carbines. I was not
long in noticing they did not lay them down at any time, not
even to load or unload patients. This was a real, shooting war.
The Jap medics carried guns and used them when they were not
caring for the wounded. The American medics carried them in
self-defense. As I looked back over the top of the Jeep on which
I was riding, Bilibid Prison was outlined darkly against the
billowing smoke and lurid flames that engulfed most of the city.
That was the last I was to see of the prison that had served as
the best home I had had in several years. Ahead, I felt freedom,
food and family. There were other problems ahead, too, but these
would be approached as they arose. Some of them were not easily
surmounted and many of them approached the danger line. Many
times before we were finally back on U. S. soil only a few
inches separated us from death.
It was close to midnight before we reached our destination,
an abandoned shoe factory outside the city. It was a big, barny
structure infested with spiders, rodents and evil smells of
leather and acids. It had been cleaned recently and presented an
altogether wholesome picture to us former inmates of prison.

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Doctors and aides were scurrying around administering to the
wants of the milling women, children and military prisoners
alike. One doctor, who apparently had been assigned to care for
the litter cases knelt down beside me and asked if I felt well
enough to stand the night. I was tense with the excitement of
the hour and asked for a sleeping potion. He said it would be
right along. First, one of the medics brought a 7 in 1 ration
all for me. It was a package of crackers, chocolate and coffee
powder. I tore at the wrapping in utter amazement. This seemed
almost too good to be true. Good American food and all for me. A
couple of the cigarettes I smoked first. Then I had some of the
chocolate candy. Then a couple of the crackers. Each of these
delicious treats I savored slowly and carefully. It was a great
moment and a blessed one.
I offered several silent prayers during that night of
liberation. And, with the aid of a sleeping pill, I slept the
sleep of utter exhaustion. Whether conscious of it or not, the
emotional stress of the day had been strenuous on our emaciated
bodies. And then, too, I had a sleeping pill. These were few and
far between in prison camp during the latter stages. For me,
they were few and far between at any time. Only in the direct
emergency was I afforded the relief from pain. They were a
blessed relief, too. The pains of beri-beri were with many of us
all the time, day and night.
It was during the long reaches of the night we were most
conscious of the nagging ache. It was not all dull ache, either.
There were times when the pains stabbed with a vicious probing
dart that jerked a fellow into gasping consciousness. At some
camps the morphine was portioned out liberally. At others, the
boys were told to grin and bear the pain rather than learn to
lean on sedatives. Some men screamed and clawed till they got a
shot. Others bore their cross more silently and grimly. Just
which was the best method, I do not yet have the insight to say.
Sleep is a blessed thing and morphine or any strong sedative
that could bring it seemed worthy of any risk that might be run.
The only person I observed who became addicted to the drugs was
a doctor who had access to a supply. All the others who took it
for any period of time came out of the valley of addiction
either by their own will power or by cessation of the supply.
I woke refreshed the next morning. Sunshine was streaming
in through the high, lofted windows of the old metal building.
It strained through the dust and fell in patches on the crowded
floor. I could sense the holiday mood of the billing men, women,
and children who crowded the place. This was the first morning
in years they had awakened to freedom.
Everybody but me, it seemed, had something to do. Doctors
and corpsmen were bending over the sick and wounded lying on the

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concrete floor. Women and children were clustered in little
groups, arms akimbo, talking and laughing in their relaxed
freedom. We could still hear the boom-boom of the big guns in
the offing. There was an air of expectancy. “What do we do now?"
seemed on every person's lips.
Evac Hospital - Santo Tomas
A doctor came by with a clip board. "Montgomery?"
questioned he. “Yes," said I.
"Montgomery, we are going to move you to a nice, clean
hospital. It won't be far and you will be in good hands."
He passed on after inquiring about my condition, which I
related was very good.
Within an hour, my litter was picked up by a couple of
corpsmen and carried outside to a waiting ambulance. Two litters
were already trussed up on hangers inside. Mine was shoved in on
the floor. The corpsmen went back and came out with another
which they shoved in along-side of mine.
The corpsman said, “You just take it easy, Coleman, they
will take good care of you at the evac hospital.”
So that was it, thought I, evac hospital.
Our ambulance started out and began to thread its way
through the rough back streets. I looked across at Coleman. He
was obviously not in good shape. He groaned in pain at every
bump and jostle of the slowly moving ambulance. His hands, which
lay folded over his chest, alternately clenched and stretched
spasmodically. His breath came in short, shallow drafts.
Coleman, I sensed, was a very sick man indeed. I tried to comfort
him with words of better things to come.
I could tell from his clothing that Coleman was a
Britisher. His wasted body, so near to deliverance, was not able
to take much more. I eyed the biscuits the corpsman had tossed
on his litter as they put him in place. My own breakfast had
consisted of just such a ration. I opened the covering and
offered Coleman a fresh biscuit. He just shook his head and
motioned for me to eat them. There was nothing I would have
liked better. During the whole of our rough trip to the
evacuation hospital I struggled with my conscience as to the
right I had to those tempting viands. It seemed one of the great
struggles of my life. Should I or should I not eat what was not
mine? I had vowed early in the war to share some of my food with
any who were hungry. I had also vowed not to eat what was not
rightfully mine. Now, on the last day before I expected to eat
regularly and well, I was tempted with a great urge to satisfy
the pangs I had known for so many years. I finally put the
biscuits back in the container and began to massage Coleman's

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chest with my free hand. I have always thanked God I did not
succumb to the almost overwhelming desire for those few
crackers. It gave me great strength to know that I could still
resist so great an urge to satisfy a physical want.
I contented myself with pouring a little water from my
canteen on a piece of toweling and laying it across Coleman's
forehead. He just turned his head and gave me a wan smile. It
was not long before we drew up before the doors of the
evacuation hospital. This was an imposing structure of tan
brick, three stories in height and perhaps one hundred yards in
length. There was a central tower about six stories high, a sort
of bell-tower which rose above the entrance. This, I was told,
was Santo Tomas University. It was the former school that had
been the home of many civilian internees for the past three
years. Since its liberation, it had been turned into a hospital
by an American medical unit.
Our ambulance was unloaded and the litters placed near the
front entrance. Almost immediately doctors and corpsmen began
the process of identifying, asking questions, looking for
wounds, feeling pulses. I was very concerned about Coleman and
was relieved to see that within minutes the medics had rigged up
a plasma bottle and were giving him an intravenous injection.
When the doctor bent over me, his stethoscope moving about
my skinny chest, I just said, "Don't worry about me, doc, I
could go bear hunting with a buggy whip." He smiled, turned back
my eyelids, made a few notations on his clipboard and motioned
for a corpsman to take me off.
I was carried into a big room filled with canvas cots. It
was a solid sea of cots with only narrow aisles in between. I
was about the first patient and chose a bunk near the window
that looked out into the front yard. I was very sorry I had
chosen that vantage point later on.
I was amazed, too, to see a nurse, a Filipino nurse in
immaculate white starched uniform, cap and all. She had, I
learned, been recruited by the medical corps and put to work.
She was pretty, kindly, and from the band on her cap, a graduate
nurse. My mood was most exuberant and I settled back to watch
this new world of efficient helpfulness.
By lunch time, the room was almost full of patients. Nurse
and corpsmen were busy everywhere. I could look out my window
and watch the ambulances pull up, disgorge their loads and drive
off. We had a lunch of weiners and stewed tomatoes mixed
together on a tin plate. It really tasted like American food,
too.
About four o'clock in the afternoon a big Army truck pulled
up out in front full of very tanned, healthy looking American
girls in dungarees. They were Army nurses who had volunteered

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for front line duty. With a great splash of laughter and
horseplay, they jumped down, trooped into the hospital and got
to work. This hospital was really getting into high gear.
Within an hour after those nurses arrived, I was dozing
peacefully in anticipation of dinner. A tremendous explosion
rocked my bunk, rent the air with the sound of breaking glass
and the shrill whistle of shell fragments. Within a minute,
there was another fierce explosion and then, another. We were,
without a doubt, being shelled. During the first lull, I looked
out and saw a crater at the very spot where those nurses had
disembarked from their truck not long before. The Japanese had a
well-placed gun and were dropping shells right in the front door
of the hospital. The big Red Cross flag was torn in shreds by
the first volley. Most of the rest of the shells that evening
hit in the upper floors of the hospital, wounding many. The only
thing we could do was lie quietly and hope for the best. The
shelling continued for an hour or so.
At intervals during the next day a few shells would land
close by with a detonation like a sharp clap of heavy thunder.
In the evening, they came more frequently. We heard there were
already some 200 casualties. We were moved out into the hall for
a time that night. As we tried to relax in the face of one of
the grim realities of war, a corpsman paused to rest on the edge
of my cot. He passed out a cigarette and began to chat. There
was another loud explosion and a piece of shell fragment ripped
through one of the plywood doors that stood between us and the
exposed room that was our ward. It lodged in the corpsman's arm
and blood spurted as though he had been slashed with a knife. He
was bandaged up in a hurry and said, "Now maybe I will get the
night off and have a chance to catch up on my sleep."
The doctor who bandaged up the flesh wound poo-pooes the
idea, saying, "If I give you the night off all you will do is to
write home some lurid story about being wounded in battle."
Another casualty, a doctor who was wounded while performing
surgery, was moved in beside me during the bombardment. A piece
of cement dislodged by the shelling had struck him in the back
of the head. The blow had blinded him. I was in contact with
this fine doctor for over a month after the incident and he had
still not regained his sight though it was possible he would.
So it went for the next ten days or so. During the
evenings, we braced ourselves for the shelling. There were
times, too, when the Japanese dropped mortar shells behind the
hospital. You could hear these dropping, their shrill scream
foretelling the violence of the explosions to follow.
A battery of four 105 mm American guns was set up not far
back of the hospital and these added to the din when they fired
counter-battery at the offending Japanese guns. The enemy guns

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were located across the Pasig River on the 7th floor of the post
office building. A portion of the wall of the building had been
knocked out, a three-inch gun hoisted to that level and aimed at
the hospital. Being protected from above by the three concrete
floors, the gun would not be bombed out. It took a company of
tough American Rangers a week to work their way through the
Japanese defense system to the post office. Then, fighting from
floor to floor, they finally cleared the building and destroyed
the gun. How many casualties they took in the process we will
never know. It was a tremendous relief, though, to be able to
fall asleep once again without the fear of waking up with a real
live Japanese shell in your lap.
Almost everything about the situation at Santo Tomas was
abnormal. The purpose of an evacuation hospital is to receive
casualties, give them emergency treatment and get them on their
way to base hospitals as soon as possible. Usually such a setup
operates in a more stable area than the front lines. In addition
to our precarious position, the food supply was spotty and
irregular. The battle casualties were high and the residents of
the former internment camp ravenously hungry. The Army medics
had made special preparations for the relief of this particular
camp. One pediatrician told me he had been assigned, briefed,
and readied for the job of taking care of the children of
internees a year before the invasion of the Philippines.
Additional nurses were assigned to the unit to care for the
civilian internees. Priorities for food had been authorized.
It was a miracle to me that the unit was able to set up an
operate and come within a reasonable degree of efficiency within
so few hours.
The civilian internees mobbed every ration truck that
approached the gates. Many made themselves sick by drinking
whole cans of milk and eating excessively. In spite of all the
difficulties, meals were put out at least twice a day during my
stay at Santo Tomas.
Santo Tomas, as I have said, had been one of the better
schools of higher education in the Philippines before the war.
The Japanese had turned it into a concentration camp for the
civilian Americans and British captured in the Philippines as
well as the American nurses captured on Corregidor. Many
civilians interned there had children. Many couples lived
together in small shacks constructed around the main building.
The camp was under a civil administration and, as such, fared
better than military concentration camps. Men from Bilibid
Prison were assigned to garbage details that picked up the
refuse from Santo Tomas for two years. These men told of seeing
half-filled cans of evaporated milk soured and thrown away. They
reported amounts of garbage in the cans that would have been

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considered delicacies by military prisoners. These evidences of
a better life for the civilians did a great deal to boost the
morale of the prisoners at Bilibid. Some of them had wives at
Santo Tomas. It was heartening to know the women and kids were
not being starved as we were. It must be said, too, that in the
last eight months of imprisonment before February, 1945, the
civil administration of the camp was changed to military. The
good times changed, too. From that day till they were released,
the prisoners at Santo Tomas had rough going indeed.
One major characteristic that came to my attention almost
as soon as I came in contact with the first interned person I
met was the amount of tension that had generated within the
confines of the institution, where no esprit de corps or pride
of organization had been developed, where it was every man for
himself and his children or wife. The intrigue mounted to a high
degree. I talked with married men and with bachelors. I became
acquainted with nurses and with cooks. They all had the same
thing to say. There were those who had enough and those who were
denied access to enough. I do not say these elements were not
present in the military prisons, too. I experienced the same
thing at Cabanatuan for a time. At most of the other military
camps, especially after the first year, the program was one of
cooperation to a greater or lesser degree.
It must be said of Santo Tomas that the parents of children
there were hard put to scrape together enough to adequately feed
their children. Only by a rigid self-denial and by doing menial
chores for others could they maintain them on a normal diet. It
was a primitive situation where the strongest lived better than
the weak, where the real test of parenthood came to the fore. To
have one's self to care for under adverse conditions is one
thing. To have the responsibility of children under those
conditions is another. No one can blame a parent for doing a bit
of grafting on the side to feed his hungry child. It was this,
perhaps, and the mixture of sexes that caused the greatest
amount of tension.
The food must have been better most of the time. The
medicine must have been more plentiful most of the time. The
care and treatment must have been more adequate. This is all
proved by the low death rate and the slight weight loss--an
average of about twenty pounds per person (fifteen among the
Army nurses) suffered by the internees.
Besides the shelling, the atmosphere of covert intrigue at
Santo Tomas was the most objectionable element in my week there.
I was heartily glad to be rid of it and the whispering groups
and sidelong glances.

Hospital at Quezon City
-194-
I was being taken, so the litter carriers told me when they
came to the ward, to Quezon City, formerly a large tuberculosis
sanitorium on the edge of the city of Manila. It was said to be
a well-equipped hospital once again after several years of being
used for other purposes by the Japs.
One thing that impressed me deeply now was the matter of
fact methods these medical corpsmen used. They seemed to have as
much pride in their job as I had previously had in mine. It was
a relief, too, to be handled by someone who was fit for the job.
During our imprisonment, I received the best care that was to be
had under the conditions at our disposal. Even so it always hurt
me a little to see men who were hungry and tired have to fetch
and carry for me. Those men did a grand job and I will be
eternally thankful. I felt the only way I could repay them for
their efforts was appreciation and cheerfulness. Now, I didn't
have to worry about the boys overextending themselves. Now they
were these bronzed, sinewy boys with a bounce and vigor.
I really saw little on our run to Quezon City. It did look
to be a fairly modern building and very big. The ward where I
was quartered held a number of other ex-prisoners as well as
some battle casualties. The walls of the place showed evidence
of fire. We were told the Nips had tried to set fire to the
structure before they retired. At any rate, it was a class "A"
building and built to house the sick. Our corpsman was an exsailor
who really knew his business. He had been let out as
physically unqualified for sea duty by the Navy and had joined
the Army. He did a grand job, too.
I was feeling very fit all this time. My feet gave me
trouble at night, but that was one of the normal problems, it
seemed. I could not walk or even stand. My eyesight was still
blurry but my spirits were really high.
Food at Quezon City was a bit better than at Santo Tomas.
They Passed a sugar bowl of sugar for the coffee here. You could
use all you wanted. I remember well using about half sugar and
half coffee. I rehearsed and rehearsed my little spiel to the
doctor about allowing me to have a can of milk with each meal. I
felt that if I could only have that extra dietary treat I would
be up and about in no time. I also counseled myself to just be
patient for a while longer and I would get all the food I
wanted.
It all came to naught. The doctor said he would give me as
much food as he could, but that the supply was scarce. There
were times when we could have all the butter we wanted and times
when there was no butter. I saved sugar from one day to the next
and even started a store of salt. This was normal prison camp

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procedure and I could not resist storing up a supply against a
hungry day.
I had only been at Quezon City a couple of days when the
night air was shattered by several fierce detonations close by.
They had the unmistakable sound of shellfire. Though our ward
was not hit, we learned in the morning that the Nips had gotten
seven 105 mm shells into a ward close by during the night
firing. The ward was only slightly occupied and no one was
seriously hurt. Some of the patients were moved in with us from
that ward and that is the way I met Jack Heek.
Jack was a nervous little man of, perhaps, sixty odd. His
hair was white, whether from the dietary deficiency of three
years in Santo Tomas or from age, I cannot tell. He also wore a
sharp, little pointed goatee that was also white. Jack had been
obviously upset by the shelling of the night before. He
certainly had reason to be. His pillow was hit by cement
fragments that landed so close to his head they broke the
glasses under his pillow. I was fascinated by the hair-raising
dramatics of his story of the incident. Jack's accent, which I
found out to be Swiss, and his stumbling diction heightened the
effect of his terror. After hearing accounts of this sort of
thing before from men who consciously played down the danger of
the situation, it was good to hear an incident told by one who
was thoroughly and admittedly scared to death.
Jack also told me he was the former chef of the Manila
Hotel. For hours he related the honors he had enjoyed in that
position. He talked lovingly of the recipes he had prepared for
dignitaries on tour. He spoke of his assistants. He gesticulated
with fervor over each detail of his stories and delighted me
with the intensity of his devotion to the business of cookery.
Jack was a real tonic for me. I had associated with men who
had seen much of danger and death. Here was a man of an entirely
different sort who wanted none of this war business. He only
wanted to get behind a kitchen range and taste the soup. Jack
was very bitter about the treatment he received during his stay
at Santo Tomas. Being a single man with little knowledge of
foraging he had few friends, and only the barest of rations. He
reinforced my opinion of the conniving and intrigue that must
have gone on at Santo Tomas.
I got a lot of pleasure out of Jack and his protestations
of Honesty. He always maintained no grafting through the
eminence of his position as chef ever entered his head.
"Of course," he said, "I demanded and always got the ten
percent cut on everything I bought for the kitchen."
This, he considered only a normal remuneration due a chef.
Jack loved a good cigar. He told me so. When my doctor came
through the next day smoking a cigar, I put the bite on him for

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a couple. The doc was a most generous man and brought me half a
dozen. I gave them to Jack and he really smoked up a storm.
I also met two British lads in their early teens during my
stay at Quezon City. They were on the way home from a visit with
their father in Singapore when the war caught them in Manila.
They were grand boys, characterizing the maturity of all the
youngsters who had spent three years as internees. Something in
the form of schools had been organized at Santo Tomas, but the
real education was in the close association with adults much of
the time. The constant talk of the problem of survival and the
efforts put forth to make that survival a reality matured these
youngsters long before their time. The lack of toys, movies,
luxuries and a changing environment during the formative years
had a hand in their development as well. Some of the same
elements that gave us military prisoners an emotional peace
operated to make them very stable citizens.
I had been in the Quezon City hospital ward for only a
couple of days when a Red Cross representative appeared and
asked my name. When I told her she produced a letter written by
my very own wife. It was hard for me to believe but I knew the
type of the typewriter and the signature was genuine. It was a
long, newsy letter and as the Red Cross lady read it to me, I
cried very unashamedly. It was really the first news I had had
in years and it was like a shot in the arm. The letter had been
written months before when it appeared that the Yanks might get
to Manila and might find some of the boys there. It was a long
shot and it paid off. How many hundred thousands of other
letters they had and did not deliver, I will never know. Mine
got to me and for this, as well as many other great services, I
have always felt a soft place for the American Red Cross.
I got some paper and a pencil from the Red Cross lady and
began to write some letters of my own. I had already sent a
cable to Florence at the request of the Red Cross. I had lain
awake all one night wording it. I wanted to tell my gal that I
was alive and on the way home but I knew we were not out of the
woods yet and did not want to build up her hopes too high. I
wanted to let her know I was not a whole man but not discourage
her about my future. When the time came to send the cable, the
allowance was for ten words only. I had to revise my letterlength
message, so I simply said, "Keep your fingers crossed but
get your lipstick handy." That with the signature was ten words
and said something of what I meant.
After four or so noisy days at Quezon City, for the battle
for Manila was still raging not too far away, the corpsman told
me I was slated to move on very soon.

Air Evac
-197-
When the ambulance drivers did come looking for me they
said the one magic word I had been waiting to hear, "Air Evac."
That meant San Francisco, Letterman General Hospital, and
Florence. I could have almost gotten up and walked to the air
strip.
I was moved out of the ward on a field gurney. We traveled
down the long corridors of the hospital and out into the
sunshine of the ambulance entrance.
To a litter case, traveling anywhere in strange
surroundings is like moving in a vacuum. The restricted field of
vision; the strange faces that peer over you with questions
about name, rank, and serial number; the strange, preoccupied
hands that take your pulse; the intent doctors who put their
hand on your forehead, pull back your eyelids, look casually at
the medical identification ticket tied around your neck or
pinned to your collar. I rather liked all this very objective
attention. It was as though I were a piece of meat--a very
important piece of meat, mind you--being carefully moved from
one plane to another. It all gave me a chance to see and observe
the actions of the medics and to see what was new. I acted
purely as an observer. I was never asked to take any part in the
proceedings or make any decisions. No one said, "Do you want
this plane or that plane," or "Do you want, as a matter of fact,
to go by plane at all." You were carried out, put in an
ambulance and the doors closed. The engine started and you were
off to an unknown adventure. Whether you were going north, east,
south or west, was unknown. Whether it was a quiet area or right
on the edge of the firing line was unknown. Whether the plane
was big or little, an old crate ready to fall apart or a brand
new one, were just so many details that rest in the hands of the
gods. You relax, light a cigarette, wish there weren't even
those thirty-eight hours of air time between you and the Golden
Gate.
When the ambulance doors opened, we were out of the city.
It was open, flat country. A canvas fly was set up in a field. A
number of men lay, sprawled around a central area where someone
was typing at a field desk, along side a truck. This was one of
those temporary strips where the air evacuation of casualties
was expedited. Some of the men were on litters. Some were
walking around, their arms in slings, or their heads bandaged.
They were all waiting for an air evac plane to Leyte.
The four men in our ambulance were laid down to rest. A
medic came along to check me again and give me a cup of coffee
in a paper cup. He said we would be going out very soon.

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It was not over an hour before a transport, a C47, circled,
swooped in, and taxied up to our bivouac area. Some 24 of us
were carried aboard and strapped into position. A nurse was
aboard the plane, something I had never seen before. What's more
she was a Navy nurse. Our litters were strapped up on hangers in
the cabin. I believe there were three litters above mine. The
one above me was so near to my chest I could not turn over. In
case of a minor accident this crowding would have been helpful
in preventing added injury. In a serious crash it might have
done no good, but in a serious crash everyone would have been
killed anyway.
We took off and headed south. Our rice paddy landing strip
was none too smooth, but the takeoff was good and, once
airborne, we saw little of anything till I caught sight of
greenery below us through a corner of an opening. It was a two
hour flight before we came into a good landing on a dusty
stretch of palm-fringed landing strip near Tacloban, Leyte.
Leyte
The same methodical unloading technique proceeded without a
hitch. An ambulance drove up, we were loaded in, secured, and
whisked off to another hospital. This one was the 118th General
Hospital. All I saw of it as we approached was a series of flys,
tents, ropes, and canvas shields. All lay under a panel of dust.
As each truck or cargo carrier wheeled down the road to the
waterfront, another cloud of dust rose and settled in the warm,
still air. It looked as though these people were fighting a war,
and they were.
As I had found out during the four months of the Bataan
campaign, war was still more mud and dust and waiting than
bloodletting and shooting. The boys who made the landings on the
island of Leyte really ran into mud troubles. Three distinct
typhoons hit the island at the height of the fighting. Mud ran
down the mountains till it was several feet thick over every
road and trail. The Nips, who depended more upon manpower to
transport their equipment than we did, had a distinct advantage
in this phase. It was the mechanical excellence and ingenuity of
the Yanks as well as their air power and superior numbers that
finally decimated the Japanese forces and secured the island. It
was a heavenly feeling for me to be out of the combat zone. For
all of our nonchalance and debonair attitude under fire we
prisoners were just as scared to death as any newcomer to the
fray. We had just been in it longer and knew that showing a
white feather did no good at all. That made us seem more
unconcerned.

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The 118 General Hospital was sprawled out all over
creation, it seemed. I was assigned to a ward that was roofed by
a canvas fly. It had a board walkway between the rows of beds.
There were medical corpsmen and a doctor. There was also that
blessed adjunct to any hospital, a truly dedicated nurse. Her
name was Lee, Second Lieutenant Lee. She was a bit on the heavy
side and she was dressed in coveralls. She was as jolly and
bright a creature as ever jabbed a needle into my bottom, too.
The first thing the doctor did upon my arrival was to inquire
how I felt and how long I had been on American food.
"Give them all the food they can eat," was his order to
Miss Lee. From that time on our economy-sized disciple of
Florence Nightingale never came on the ward but what she had a
loaf of bread tucked under her arm and a can of jam or some
other goody stuffed in her pocket. She was bound and determined
to get us fat overnight. She almost succeeded, too. I gained an
average of a pound a day for the first 30 days I was out of
prison. Most of it came under the regimented and regular
stuffing improvised by Lieutenant Lee.
We got eggs every morning for breakfast. They were flown in
from Australia every day. One day when the eggs were absent, I
asked our heavyset angel if she had failed to lay any the night
before. She said the plane had developed engine trouble on the
trip and had to jettison the whole cargo, some 150 cases of 30
dozen each.
We did little but lie on our beds and watch the passing
parade of military supplies being readied for the invasion of
Mindanao. The number and quality of vehicles, the quantity of
supplies, the well-regulated schedules that had goods moving
through the night as well as the daylight hours amazed me.
I was able to talk with a Marine stationed with the
hospital and hear of the early, disastrous days of some of the
landings. He was assigned to an Army unit as being partly
disabled from his severe experiences. He gave me a Japanese
bayonet to bring home but for some reason it failed to come
through when I was shipped out.
Pelelieu
In a week or so the ambulance drove up and we were loaded
aboard for another flight and another leg of our journey to the
Golden State was started. This time we traveled by C46, the
first time I had ever seen this type of plane. Perhaps I should
say it was the first time I had seen so big a plane with only
two engines. The pilots and crews were not overly fond of them
but they seemed to serve the purpose well enough. We made the

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trip to Pelelieu uneventfully. Now I really got to see what the
Yanks had been fighting over for so long.
I had heard of the difficulties of taking Pelelieu from my
Marine friend on Leyte. It was hard to see how so many good
American lives had been lost in getting a foothold on this
desolate strip of coral. The Nips were well dug in and fought
with a treacherous tenacity.
There was little else but a landing strip, and a few tents.
We were unloaded and housed in one of the tents. We had some
psychos aboard the plane and they always kicked up quite a fuss.
Some were just slaphappy. Others were really off the beam with
no concept of reality. There were mostly battle casualties, not
prison camp inmates.
In getting back to the strategic value of Pelelieu, it is
easy to try to second guess. It seemed to me the same tactics
used by the Nips, that of starvation, would have been a much
simpler method of getting islands for bases. As a matter of
fact, there were hundreds of islands to be had all down the
line. With air and naval superiority they could have been
secured easily. With bases once set up, a carefully planned
approach to the strongly held Nip islands could have reduced
them with far less loss of life. The more Nips on any one
island, the more food they require. If no new food was coming
those Nips would get just as hungry and just as weak as we had
on Bataan.
We left Pelelieu early the next morning and headed for the
southern islands of Biak or Hollandia. Hollandia, once the
really big base among the New Guinea Islands was now being
abandoned as the Yanks moved even further and further north. We
were set down at Biak.
Biak, Tarawa and Hawaii
Here again we saw the pattern first evident at Leyte. Miles
and miles of supply dumps, rows and rows of tents, flys, tin
shacks. Sand and beach stretched everywhere. Dust rose in
clouds, though the coral of Biak was not nearly so dusty as the
dirt of Leyte. There was one big wooden structure that I
surmised to be a movie theatre.
The hospital area of the island was built on coral. It was
fairly cool through the warm tropical day. The coverall-clad
nurses were very attentive, too. I ran into the first WACS I had
ever seen in the Army at Biak, too. We thought they were nurses
and were straightened out right away. These gals seemed to do a
good job around the hospital but were less efficient when they
had to be working among men at other duties. We were told the
number being sent home in a pregnant condition was out of all

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proportion to the number on duty. With so many men and so few
women, competition for dates was very keen. The girls would hand
out dates by the hour. An attractive young lady would have as
many as half a dozen boy friends in an evening.
There were still some Nips in the hills of Biak and supply
dumps were being raided periodically. I also saw some of the
fuzzy-headed natives of the island. One of them was brought in
after being hit by an Army truck. He was, undoubtedly, one of
the dirtiest individuals I have ever seen. Grease and grime
covered him from head to toe. His hair was a thick, wooly mass
of grease and odd-looking bone pins. He got the works as soon as
his broken leg was set. That native must have had a story of
grand proportions to tell his grandchildren--he stayed in the
hospital as long as was necessary for the healing of the leg and
picked up many a foreign truck.
It was only a few days till we heard of our departure for
Stateside. By now I had gained considerable weight and fervor
for the trip. I slept well, ate well and was very keen to be up
and doing. It was evening when the carriers came. This time we
were loaded by lift into one of the bigger, four-engine planes.
It was a C54, I believe. Our course lay out over the wide
expanse of the Pacific. I tried hard to relax and did a fair job
of it. The crowding was just as bad as on all the other trips,
but the nurses had coffee and crackers and a kind word or bit of
attention any time we called. I woke to see daylight through the
window and was told we were going to land at Tarawa.
The time element escapes me here. We were traveling across
seeming endless oceans of water. It must have been about noon
the next day when we set down at Tarawa. The palm trees showed
signs of the battle that had raged on this strip of sand some
years before. There were a few quonset huts, an air strip and
much sand. I felt a thrill at being able to see the place,
though. We were unloaded and had a makeshift lunch. The plane
was refueled and our trip began again. The next stop scheduled
was Johnson Island. As we droned on into the evening, I slept
well. When I awoke, the nurse was bending over me with the Mae
West in her hand. She said our winds had been favorable and we
had navigated directly to Hickam Field, in the Hawaiian Islands.
On these overwater hops we wore Mae Wests most of the time. When
we came in for landings on strips whose ends ran toward the
water we were especially careful to wear them. An overshot
landing might put you in the drink pronto.
At Hickam we really felt we were on the way home. The
unloading process was attended by a band and we were told we
would have a few hours layover. Clean, orderly hospital cots
were waiting for us in a near white building. A chaplain came in
to see if we wanted anything. Johnnie Winterhalter, one of the

-202-
other P.0.W.s on the plane wanted a fountain pen. I wanted some
hair oil of all things. My hair, which had been clipped close to
my head, was getting pretty shaggy with the passage of time. I
felt I could improve my appearance for the happy meeting with
Florence if I tried to groom it a bit. The length of hair and
fact that the hair oil was thin as water only made me a bit more
grotesque, I imagine.
It was a happy occasion at any rate and we thoroughly
enjoyed the attention and comfort and good food.
The last leg of the flight to the mainland was only some 14
hours. Our landing at Hamilton Field was blocked by fog and we
sat down at Fairfield, near Sacramento, where I had visited many
times before the war. It was a grand feeling to be lifted out of
that plane and onto the sacred soil of the United States once
again. It had been three years, five months, and five days since
we had pulled out of the dock at San Francisco that October 4,
1941. It was now March 9, 1945.
After a short spell in a receiving ward at Fairfield, the
carriers came around again and told us we were going to be moved
to Letterman General Hospital in the heart of San Francisco.
The trip down was easy and pleasant. On one occasion, the
ambulance stopped for a considerable time. I managed to raise up
and peer out the back window. We were sitting right in the
middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a thrill I had waited
long to experience and one I had given myself a small chance to
accomplish. At Davao, we had evaluated our chances of getting
out alive. As it turned out only about 25 percent of that group
ever lived to see the Golden Gate. I was one of the lucky ones.
Letterman General Hospital
CHAPTER XIII
HOME AGAIN
I was, quite naturally, filled with excitement,
anticipation and delight when I realized that Letterman General
Hospital was to be my first stop. As one of the six casualties
in that ambulance that had brought us from Travis Air Base to
San Francisco, I was unloaded with the others. The process was
matter of fact, efficient, and impersonal. I was placed on a
gurney and wheeled past a series of tables where clerks read the
tag tied to my jacket and assigned me a room. I was, as I found
out later, a "Project J." That meant I got the best the house
had to offer. This designation of Prisoners of War, Japanese,
had been set up many months before. We were to have first

-203-
priority, the best of everything. As far as I can attest, we got
just that.
My personal belongings consisted of an old Japanese
haversack stuffed with a change of underwear, a mess kit, roll
of toilet paper and a small sheet from Bilibid Prison, my last
contact with my former hosts. I was wearing an old pair of khaki
trousers and a faded shirt, topped by a jacket I had made out of
a blanket and parts of another wornout shirt. Someone had
evidently tossed my homemade shoes out of the plane somewhere
along the line from Leyte. At any rate, they were not among my
possessions when I arrived at the Golden Gate.
I was assigned to room with Major Wolf, an old prison camp
friend. I was firmly convinced that I should stay at Letterman
Hospital for a few months while I regained the use of my legs,
completed the reorganization of my affairs and arranged to get
back to duty. I felt that it was just a matter of time until
good food, expert medical care and a few months of exercise in a
pool would have me back in tiptop shape.
We were told that we could go to whatever General Hospital
was closest to our home or, as a matter of fact, to whatever
hospital we would like to be sent to.
I was assigned an orderly to help me get straightened
around. When he told me there was a general hospital at Palm
Springs, California, I began to have doubts about staying in San
Francisco. Palm Springs, a fine desert resort, was delightful in
the spring and this was just April. It was close to Riverside
where my wife was teaching school. It was close to March Air
Force Base where I had done a number of years of duty and where
many of my friends were still stationed. I put in for Torney
General Hospital, Palm Springs. The Army Medical Corps had taken
over the finest hotel in town and converted it into a hospital.
It looked like a good deal to me.
My orderly also told me I had a free telephone call to my
wife coming. Was I ready to go down and make the call?
Only after I had given the operator the approximate
location of Chemawa Junior High School where my wife taught, did
I begin to have the jitters. The call was duly put through and
the school secretary answered.
”Who is calling?" said she.
"This is Bill Montgomery," said I.
Then I began to cry. Through several minutes of trying to
control my tears I learned that my wife was assisting with a
demonstration at another school and that if I would leave my
number she would get in touch with me.
That call, the culmination of weeks and years of dreams,
anticipation and wishful thinking was too much for nervous
systems like mine to take. I cried for an hour and never was

-204-
able to talk more than a word or two. The orderly finally
completed the call and told me that my wife would take the next
train and be in San Francisco the next day. I, who had learned
to be nonchalant and even casual about bombing raids, shell fire
and the prospect of death, was reduced to a mass of blubbering
jelly at the immediate prospect of talking to my wife.
By the next day, when she walked into my room, I was in
better control. We had a few hours together and we decided that
I should put in for a transfer to Palm Springs. I related to her
my confidence in a quick rehabilitation. She told me of our
family and friends. I began to realize I was not quite as far
along the road to normalcy as I had thought.
Torney General Hospital
The hospital train that took me to Palm Springs was a
delight. I had a bunk beside a window. All the way down through
the canyons and over the mountains I was able to see and feel
the beauties of my native state. A Red Cross lady even gave me a
knitted sweater. It had been so long since I had been given
anything that this was a great treasure.
My arrival at the Palm Springs station next morning was
filled with the impersonal but efficient unloading process. I
was taken to the hospital by ambulance and wheeled into a big,
airy, cheerful room on the second floor.
"Do you want something to eat?" That seemed to be the
question most often asked me. I had gained something like 30
pounds since my release from Bilibid Prison a month before, and
I was only normally hungry by this time. I had not suffered any
of the stomach problems that plagued many an ex-POW. I had been
on a somewhat restricted diet for the first week of my release.
After that I ate as much as I wanted.
The day after my arrival the doctors gave me a thorough
examination, prescribed a number of medications and put me on a
high protein diet. My roommates, a half a dozen battle
casualties from the European theater, brought me up to date on
their part of the war. Life was taking on a decidedly rosy hue.
That weekend, my wife was down from Riverside to see me. She
brought the uniform she had had made when she had received the
news I was coming home. My measurements she had on file from
prewar and, with some misgivings, she had them followed exactly.
The uniform was a perfect fit. The weight I had gained on my
return trip put me back at normal, a “moderately thin, white,
male" as the medical chart described me.
While that description may have been sufficient for
clinical purposes, I always preferred the somewhat more romantic
handle one nurse hung on me. She jerked her thumb back over her

-205-
shoulder and said to another nurse, "that big, bad, blonde
bastard from Bataan." And, so, for a general diagnosis.
I was confined to bed and a wheel chair for the time being.
While my sight was not good, I was able to see a pattern of the
room and surroundings. With the aid of a strong magnifying
glass, I could read large print. I was, however, totally blind
in my central vision with an official designation of 20/200
vision. It is surprising how well one can accommodate to such
disabilities, though. I learned to recognize people by the way
they moved around. Each person, it seems, has a distinctive
motion of the shoulders, hips or some other part of the body.
Some people carry their hands or arms in a certain way that
immediately identifies them. Others have a particular movement
of the shoulders. My great trouble was in the identification of
girls who were constantly changing their hair-dos and
consequently their silhouettes. Still, I found that it was just
as well to say "hello" to everyone I met. No one took offense,
at any rate.
The doctor, after prescribing his potions, left me alone
for a week or so. I got a liver shot every day. I got a handful
of vitamins morning and evening. I got at least two injections
of a vitamin B complex a day. I don't know just how much good
those three shots a day did me, but I began to feel like a
pincushion. Even though I had the nurses distribute the shots
around my body, I still seemed to have a very sore bottom most
of the time.
Very soon after arriving at Torney General, I began writing
letters to the parents of boys whose names were in my little
black book. It was difficult going and one Grey Lady, seeing the
problem, offered the help of her daughter. That is how "Cookie"
Williams entered my life. Cookie, who was really Marian Williams
and a senior at Pomona College, was a delightful eyeful to grace
any man's bedroom. She was the prettiest young thing I had seen
in years. She was equally competent, pleasant and efficient. She
would come in for her regular stint of taking dictation each
morning and the other officers in the room were something more
than obvious by their presence. Marian and I would get down to
work, though, and turn out several long letters each session. My
wife would come down from her teaching job in Riverside and also
help with the mail. I don't know how many hundred letters I
wrote those first several months back in the States, but it
seemed endless. I would try, in the original letter, to give
everything I knew about the man to whose folks I was writing.
Most of the time I did not know whether it was parents, wife or
just an address. I would address the letters to "Re: John Doe"
and put an address from my little book. I was chary about
reporting a man dead even if I was pretty sure he was. Only if

-206-
I had buried the man as part of my duties as one charge of the
grave digging detail atone camp, did I actually say the man was
dead.
Some of the parents and relatives who lived fairly close by
came to visit. My family also came down from Los Angeles.
These reunions were memorable occasions, of course. My
mother, father, sister and her family came in one group. I was
wheeled out onto the patio amid the shrubs and flowers and we
visited for several hours. The other officers on my small ward
had seen to it that my uniform was pressed and that the proper
ribbons were all in place and my brass shined. I had achieved a
considerable confidence and emotiona1 equilibrium out of my long
experience with war. There seems to be a certain something one
gains from having passed through "harm's way" and come out with
even a part of one's skin. Call it confidence or swagger or
strength, it is an added dimension. No one who has not been
exposed to extreme danger can taste this elixir.
One afternoon the nurse announced that a naval officer
would like to see me. In walked my brother, straight, tall and
wearing his shoulder-boards with dignity. He stopped half way
across the room and said in a tone I knew so well, “You big
bastard, you still have all your hair!"
Then he took off his cap and showed me an almost bald head.
"You might, at least, have lost as much hair as I did,"
said he.
Very soon I began to query the doctor about beginning work
on the rehabilitation process. He stock answer was that I should
rest a few more days. Finally, though, I was wheeled down to
Physical Therapy.
Each morning after that I would climb into my wheel chair
right after breakfast and hie off down the ramp to P.T. The
first order of business was to begin the long, slow process of
building up my legs, toes, feet and lower extremities. I could
move each member with ease, but I could not tell where they were
without a visual sighting. By this time, too, I had been to the
eye clinic. By a series of plottings I found that I was totally
blind in the central vision. I could see a pattern, as I have
mentioned. Still, anything I looked at had a big hole in it.
About 25 percent of the central portion of my sight was gone.
What I saw was seen by peripheral vision. Like the lens of a
camera, this peripheral vision was not quite in true focus. In
trying to read, even with big type, I had to move my head to
encompass the length of a word. In so doing, I would lose my
place because part of the word would be in the blind spot. With
a magnifying glass I could read some rather large print, but the
strain was too great for me to continue long. The optic nerve,
said the doctor, was "pale," indicating atrophy.

-207-
This same sensory nerve atrophy extended to my legs and
arms, increasing "distally" from the body. Though my fingers
were numb, my hands and arms were in far better shape than my
legs and feet. It was mostly a sensory nerve problem, but the
damage in my legs had extended to some of the motor nerves as
well.
I spent hours each day practicing picking up marbles with
my toes and putting them into a small box. I swam in the heated
pool each afternoon. I worked on the rowing machine to build up
the general tone of the little used muscles. I tried situps,
pushups and walking between parallel bars. After even the
slightest exertion, I was wringing wet with sweat. Through all
this I had the help and tender, loving care of some of the most
beautiful and delightful young ladies in the world. The girls in
the Physical Therapy department and the nurses on the ward all
tried their best to encourage my efforts. My wife, whose counsel
was invariably sound, had gotten a small cottage on the
outskirts of town and was able to visit me twice a day during
the regular visiting hours. We read the mail together and
planned our future. The first decision was that she should
resign from her teaching post in Riverside. I realized by this
time that my hospitalization would be of considerable duration.
I would need her strength, courage and devotion to lean on. Most
of all, I suppose, I needed her wise counsel and ability at
problem solving.
Of problems there was no lack. We owned a house in
Riverside which the renter was hounding us to sell. We finally
arrived at a price of $6,500 and sold. I had finally had a talk
with the Finance Officer of the hospital and his computation of
my pay came to something like $7,700. He was empowered to write
checks not to exceed $500; he wrote me 15 checks for $500 each.
Thereafter, I received my checks by mail from the War
Department. My wife had deposited my allotment checks in the
bank during my absence, and we built up something akin to
security.
In the military service, of course, one fills out forms of
all sorts, answers personal questions with impunity and knows
that everyone, or at least a great many people, have access to
the file. When the lady who sold war bonds came up to see me in
answer to my request and made out the slip for $1,000 worth of
war bonds, she asked as a matter of course, What denomination?"
I thought it was a little queer, but gave it not a second
thought as I answered, "Protestant." I still got the bonds,
though.
My life at Torney General was placid and exciting by turns.
The comfort, beauty and ease of the life was a constant
revelation to me. I had been used to a bench without more than a

-208-
thin, straw ticking instead of a clean, white sheeted bed. I had
usually depended upon friends for any service or help and I
hasten to add, they were magnificent. Still, to be able to ring
for anything from a glass of water to a sirloin steak was
heartening.
By order of the War Department, too, I had been promised
promotion. During the Battle of Bataan, I was recommended for
promotion to First Lieutenant. It would have been necessary for
me to travel all the way to Corregidor to receive the award, but
I was under orders not to get more than 100 yards back of the
front lines. Now, no one seemed to know the details. Too, I was
still officially an Infantry officer and I wanted to get back to
the Air Corps, where I belonged.
In the end, I wrote General Hap Arnold a letter listing my
few grievances. Within a week my promotion and transfer to Air
Corps came through, along with a very attentive liaison officer.
I had worked for General Arnold at both North Island in San
Diego and at March Air Force Base when he was a major. He had
always told us boys to call on him if we needed help. He made
good on his promise. Those several months' delay, though, had
already cost me over $300 in the increased pay of a first
lieutenant over that of a second lieutenant.
Santa Ana Regional Hospital
As the war drew to a close in September, 1945, the doctor
told me the hospital was to be closed down. I was given a choice
of places for transfer. I chose Santa Ana Regional Hospital.
This was on an air base not too far from Riverside, California.
In October, I was sent down there and stayed five months.
With the rapid disbanding of the military forces soon after
cessation of hostilities, that hospital, too, was soon reduced
to a station hospital. Once again I was asked where I wanted to
go. I chose Bushnell General Hospital at Brigham City, Utah, a
neurological center.
About the only thing that sticks in my mind about the few
months at Santa Ana was a happy reunion with some of the boys I
had one duty with at March and other bases before the war. I was
being tooled in my wheel chair to the dental clinic one day when
I heard the screech of brakes and the honking of a horn. A
battered old car pulled to a stop right in the middle of the
street and Jim Beach, an old buddy, leaped out to swarm over me.
Jim was wearing what must have been the dirtiest, most
dilapidated old flight jacket I had ever seen. On his head was
the greasiest, 50 mission flop garrison cap I have ever seen. He
was the same effusive, ebullient and raucous Jim Beach. At this
time, he was an officer instead of a sergeant. Jim had manned a

-209-
small boat in the English Channel during the war picking up
downed airmen. He had been shot up by German fighters a number
of times and managed to recover.
Ray Knox was another boy I met at Santa Ana. He was a paper
shuffler and a most efficient one who had made good. Another
oldtimer, T. J. Gilbreath, walked into my ward one day and we
caught up on old times.
My doctor at Santa Ana was probably the most astute medical
man of my whole convalescence. He not only got me out of a wheel
chair by threatening to take it away from me, but he had me take
yeast pills, at lease half a pound of them a day. I walked with
two crutches by this time and though I was wringing wet after
only a few yards, I was beginning to get the hang of putting one
foot in front of the other.
Bushnell General Hospital
After being transferred to Bushnell General Hospital in
Utah, I continued to work out in the swimming pool, take special
exercises and walk with crutches until I was exhausted. Too, I
found at Bushnell, a physical therapist who knew how to teach me
the art of walking. At this stage of my rehabilitation,
something more than just physical reconditioning was necessary.
It took an expert to guide my course. Peg Blumenthal was
necessary. She was the expert. She made me work with certain
basic movements day after dreary day. Recognizing that I would
never recover my sense of balance which had been lost by atrophy
of segments of the spinal cord, she kept constantly at the
process of retraining both old and new patterns.
One German prisoner of war, and there were several hundred
such German prisoners working in the hospital, told me one day
as I struggled along the corridor adjacent to my room, "You walk
every day better."
The fact that my wife, who lived with a little old Mormon
lady in town, came to visit and read to me twice a day made a
private room a necessity. Since the doctors did not have a
private room on the men's side of the neurological ward, they
put me in a room on the ladies' ward. As far as I was concerned,
it was a delightful decision. The nurses and WACS, with nothing
better to do, would fuss over me, talk to me of their problems,
ask for an inspection before going out on a date and generally
made life one dizzying round of females. My wife looked upon all
this with a somewhat skeptical eye, but the girls were more than
circumspect in their behavior.
We were able to go for rides through the countryside around
the hospital and Utah in the spring was a thing of beauty. About
June of 1946, I was again transferred, this time to Madigan

-210-
General Hospital, Tacoma, Washington. I had made considerable
progress at Bushnell General, not only in building up physical
strength and coordination, but in the practice on my typing. I
could not see well enough to enjoy the movies that were shown
each night in the hospital or even enjoy the somewhat infrequent
shows that came our way. I spent my evenings writing, visiting
and walking my legs into rubbery masses. I usually went to bed
about 9 P.M. and slept the night through.
My wife would stay with me until the 8 P.M. visiting hour
was up. She read books and magazines, and we went over what I
had written, mostly letters. It was not an exciting life, but it
was so much better than I had known in the Philippines that I
was well satisfied.
Madigan General Hospital
I asked for a delay of a week in reporting to Madigan
General Hospital because we planned a trip up to Vancouver
Island, where we had spent a month some ten years before. The
trip from Brigham City, Utah, up through the Snake River country
to Oregon and, thence, on to Washington and Canada was
delightful. The summer was full of robust cheerfulness. I shall
always remember coming down that long, winding road through the
Blue Mountains into Pendleton, Oregon. The land stretched out
ahead, the green grass of the rolling hills and grassy knolls
forming a vivid and lively landscape.
We looked up old friends at Qualicum Beach, some 100 miles
north of Victoria on the island and were delighted with the
changeless beauty of the quiet waters of the inland passage.
I remember one morning, as we were ordering breakfast, that
my wife asked for two eggs, over easy, with bacon and toast.
When the dish came the eggs were right side up. She called the
waiter and insisted that he take the eggs back and cook them
"easy" on the other side. I chided her with the story of my days
in prison camp when I had been talking with Captain Sparks, who
predicted, "I suppose some of those hard working people in the
States are complaining that their eggs are not cooked just the
way they want them."
We were due back at Madigan General Hospital on a Monday
morning. I was tempted to delay our return until Tuesday,
knowing that such a delay of 24 hours would cause little
concern. Still, from long practice, I also felt that I should
not change a habit of many years' standing to be prompt, follow
orders and take my chances with the holiday throng that would be
taking the car ferry Sunday night. As it turned out I was welladvised.
I arrived at the hospital and logged in at 7 A.M.
Monday. Promptly at 8 A.M. a general muster was taken of every

-211-
man on active duty in the hospital. Had I not checked in on time
I should have been marked absent without leave.
As I was transferred from hospital to hospital, my records
were duly forwarded with me to the new location. Still, no
doctor seemed to want to take another doctor's word for a
diagnosis. At each hospital I would go through the routine of
being examined by the internist, neurologist, eye specialist and
X-rayed from head to foot. The laboratory would take vials of
blood and bottles of urine. The psychologist would talk with me
and the dentist would give me a going over for bad teeth. I
would have a long session with the physical therapy department
and a schedule of exercises and treatments prescribed. My ward
doctor would ponder all this data and reach for his needle and
poke me full of vitamin B complex, liver, and sometimes other
compounds.
My routine in the various hospitals for almost three years
was not spectacular, hospitals seldom are. My job as each doctor
reminded me, was to do as much as I could and try more than I
could do. My wife, as I have said, traveled with me from
hospital to hospital, rented a room and came to visit and read
to me each day. There were other wives in the same routine and
she quickly came to know them. They would eat together in the
Officer's mess and sometimes join for an evening's entertainment
at the club.
A very friendly Colonel and his wife invited us to the club
one night for dinner and talk. I was still confined to a wheel
chair but we looked forward to the evening.
When we were about half way through dinner, my wife leaned
over to whisper in my ear that the catch on her locket, a
favorite piece of jewelry, had evidently loosened and the locket
had slipped off and onto the floor. I rolled back my wheelchair
and made a casual search without result.
The Colonel, seeing my puzzlement, asked for the reason for
my concern. I told him of the lost locket and my wife's deep
affection for that piece of jewelry.
The Colonel was not one to take halfway measures. He got
down on his hands and knees in his immaculate uniform and began
crawling around under the tables. He enlisted several younger
officers to help and for several minutes, I was sure no part of
the dance floor was to be overlooked.
Then, my wife leaned over and whispered into my ear again.
"I remember," she said, “That I decided not to wear that locket
and took it off just before I left the house this afternoon."
I was finally able to wheel my chair over to where the
Colonel and his helpers were combing the floor and told him not
to mind, that the locket was just a bobble and we could get
another. The Colonel, though, would have none of such fiddle-

-212-
faddle. He was going to find that locket for that pretty, little
gal.
I finally had to tell him the truth and watch his amazed
and incredulous expression as he arose, dusted off his once
clean dress pants and take his seat. The party was something
less than hilarious after that.
Within a few days of arriving at Madigan General, I decided
to give away my wheel chair for good. I had used it seldom in
the past several months, but only if it were not around would I
divorce myself completely from its clutches and comfort.
One boy down the hall from my room was being discharged
within a week. He had a serious heart disease and needed a good
folding chair. I did not know it at the time, but he was
actually being sent home to die quietly in familiar
surroundings. It was only a month or so until his wife sent the
chair back to me. Still, during that time I had accustomed
myself to get along completely without depending upon the chair.
It was still very difficult for me to walk with two crutches.
But every step I took was that much farther along the road. I
was practicing with two canes, too. My greatest difficulty was
with shoes that slipped on the well-waxed floors of the hospital
corridors. I tried all sorts of rubber soled shoes and sweated
my way through those long miles of corridors as best I could.
After a month or so of diagnosis and treatment, the doctor
said one morning, “Montgomery, why don't you take a month of
sick leave?"
"Doctor," said I, "you sign the order and I'll be on my
weary way.”
That was the first of many such leaves. These were sick
leaves and did not count against my regular annual leave. My
wife and I spent most of them in a small, spanking new cabin on
Vancouver Island. We paid $100 a month for the place beside the
blue waters of the Straits of Georgia, the beginning of the
inland passage to Alaska. I fished for salmon with Charlie Nash,
a superannuated sailor from World War I. We drove to places of
interest, visited with friends on the Island, drank thousands of
cups of steaming hot tea and ate large bowls of raspberries with
thick cream. It was a good life, indeed. Our meat we bought from
the traveling butcher. Oysters we gathered from the beds down by
the old fishing dock and clams we gathered on the beach.
During the next year and a half, I had seven months of
leave of this sort. Some we spent in Canada and some in Southern
California with our families. In November of 1947, my doctor
informed me that he felt I was well enough to be retired. It was
just 20 years since I had entered the military service in
November of 1927. Because of my total disability status, I would
receive credit for 30 years of military duty. I would be

-213-
promoted to the grade of captain and be eligible for a number of
other benefits.
In due time I appeared before a retirement board and was
adjudicated a complete disability case and unfit for further
military service. I could still walk only with the aid of two
canes, but I was improving. The numbness and tingling in my legs
and feet had not diminished, but my general physical condition
was better than I had reason to expect. My sight had not changed
appreciably, but I was learning to use what I had.
While I was not eager to leave the military service, I knew
I had to make a break sometime, and this was as good a time as
any. We bade goodbye to the hospital that had been my home for
so long and began looking for a new one.

-214-
WILLIAM H. MONTGOMERY, Captain, A.U.S. 0890270 (Formerly Mr.
Sgt., Amy Air Corps, 6538929) between the period September, 1941
and November, 1947.
September, 1941 -- Left Kirtland A.F. Base, Albuquerque, N.M.,
for S. F. enroute overseas via shipboard transport, U.S.S.
Holcomb.
September. Passed through Honolulu, Guam. 19 days to Manila,
P.I.
October, 1941 -- Duty as Superintendent of Aircraft repair shops
at Clark Air Base, Pampanga, Philippine Islands.
December 24, 1941 -- Clark Air Base to Bataan, Philippine
Islands.
December 25, 1941 to January 5, 1942, stationed at Bataan Air
strip, Cabcabin, Bataan -- Duty Supt. of air craft repair.
January 5, 1942 -- transferred to Air strip #1, Bataan, P.I.,
duty - Supervisor of repair.
February 2, 1942 -- Commissioned Second Lt. U. S. Army.
February 3, 1942 -- Transferred to front lines with 41st
Division, Philippine Army - Sector D at base of Mt. Samat --
Duty as Advisor to 3 companies of Philippine Infantry of 1st
Battalion, 1st. Reg., 41st Division.
April 4, 1942 -- Withdrew with unit along Pantingan corridor
under orders.
April 5, 1942 -- Returned along Pantingan Corridor and counter
attacked previously held position.
April 5, 1942 -- Reported to Aid Station for treatment of
Dysentery and leg wound and was sent back to Evacuation
Hospital.
April 5, 1942 to April 25, 1942 -- Base Hospital, Little Baguio,
Bataan, P.I.
April 25, 1942 to April 28, 1942, enroute to Camp O'Donnell via
Balanga, Lubao, San Fernando and Capas.
June 1, 1942 -- Transferred as prisoner of war to Cabanatuan
Concentration Camp #1, duty -- Second in command of unit.
June 2, 1942 to October 5, 1942 -- Concentration Camp #1,
Cabanatuan, P.I. -- Duty -- Sub Group leader of 65 officers.
October 5, 1942 -- Transferred Concentration Camp #1 to Davao
Penal Colony, Davao, Mindanao via Manila, Cebu by ship.
November 8, 1942 to June 4, 1944 -- Davao Penal Colony,
Mindanao, P.I.
June 5, 1944 -- Left Davao Harbor for Bilibid Prison, Manila,
P.I. via Zamboanga, Cebu -- Arriving July 25.
July 25, 1944 to February 4, 1945 -- Bilibid Prison, Manila,
P.I. (Returned to U. S. control by invasion of U. S. forces)

-215-
February 4, 1945 - February 12, 1945 -- Hospitalized in Manila
at Evacuation Hospital.
February 12, 1945 - February 19, 1945 -- Quezon Hospital,
Manila, P.I.
February 19, 1945 -- Flown to Base Hospital, Tacloban, Leyte.
March 15, 1945 -- Flown to Base Hospital, Biac Island via Pale
Lou.
April 5, 1945 -- Flown Biac to San Francisco via Tarawa, Johnson
Island, Hawaii.
April 9, 1945 -- Arrive Travis A.F. Base, Sacramento,
California, and transferred to Letterman General Hospital, San
Francisco, California.
April 15, 1945 -- Transferred to Torney General Hospital, Palm
Springs, California.
October, 1945 -- Transferred to Santa Ana Regional A.F.
Hospital, Santa Ana, California.
February, 1946 -- Transferred to Bushnell General Hospital,
Brigham City, Utah.
June, 1946 -- Transferred to Madigan General Hospital, Tacoma,
Washington.
November 4, 1947 -- Retired from Service, Capt. A. U. S. (Total
Dis.)

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
HEADQUARTERS, GROUP II /bg
Cabanatuan Concentration Camp NO. 1
Cabanatuan, P.I.
-216-
October 13, 1942
This is to certify that I have known 2nd Lieutenant WILLIAM
H. MONTGOMERY, 0-890270, Infantry for approximately six (6)
months and I have found him to be an exceptional and willing
officer in all respects. Lieut. Montgomery has served under my
command as Leader of the Second Lieutenants' Sub-groups, Group
II, Cabanatuan Concentration Camp No. 1, Cabanatuan, P. I. from
July 1, 1942 to date. He has demonstrated exceptional ability
throughout this service.
I consider the disciplinary and unprecedented problems
involved in the administration of American Prisoners of War
under the present situation as an extreme test of the ability of
any officer. Lieutenant Montgomery has performed exceptionally
well under these conditions.
I recommend Lt. Montgomery for a Regular Army commission in
a grade suitable to his age and experience.
G.H. STUBBS
Lieut. Colonel, CAC
Commanding Group II

Capt. William Maxmuth,
DOTHAN STEAM LAUNDRY
Dothan, Alabama
Classification and Counseling Officer,
Madigan General Hospital,
Tacoma, Washington.
Dear Sir:
-217-
19 December 1946
I have received your letter requesting a rating on Lt.
William Hayes Montgomery for the time he was under my command in
the Philippine Islands. The dates he gave you are correct,
February 3, 1942 to 9 April 1942. I was Senior Instructor-
Advisor for the 1st Bn 41th Infantry (Philippine Army) and Lt.
Montgomery was one of my Junior Advisors and Instructors.
Although he lacked experience in the Infantry and his job was
very difficult in thos last days on Bataan, he proved himself to
be a real officer and gentleman and fine leader of men. I will
unhesitatingly give him a rating of Excellent. If you need
further detail or require the regular form I shall be glad to
help in any way I can.
John J. Martin
Lt. Col. Infantry
0-223193

REPORT OF DISPOSITION BOARD, NOV. 1947
Madigan General Hospital
BRIEF CLINICAL ABSTRACT
1st Lt. William H. Montgomery, 0 890 270, AC
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Officer states he entered military service on 14 Nov '27 as
an enlisted man. He was commissioned on 3 Feb '42 on a general
service status and was on continuous active duty and general
service until he was taken prisoner of war by the Japanese on 9
Apr '42. He remained a prisoner of war until he was liberated on
4 Feb '45. He entered Madigan General Hospital on 13 Jun '46 for
further observation, treatment and disposition.
Officer state s that he was well until about Feb. '42, when
food rations in the Philippines began to get short. This was
about three weeks prior to his capture on 9 Apr '42. He began to
notice, at that time, some weakness and lassitude. Patient was
transferred to Mindanoa on 11 Nov '42, where he remained until
Jun '44 and he was then transferred to Manila. During the time
he was in the prison camp, he had many medical illnesses which
he has listed as well as he can remember them. In May '42,
patient passed mucous and blood with little control over bowels
and marked weakness. This lasted ten days; then he took seven or
eight sulpha tablets all at once, which cleared the dysentery.
In Jul '42, he had a fever, was nauseated, with anorexia, and
with yellow eyeballs and skin. This lasted two weeks with no
special treatment. During this time, he noticed a marked
frequency of urination, but with an allergia. This lasted for
several months, and he lost a great deal of sleep. Patient
states that in Aug '42 "wet beri-beri" began and he had a
swelling of his feet and face with stinging and burning. The leg
edema never extended above his knees. This lasted for about one
month, during which time he noticed some loss of dexterity of
his legs. At the same time he had extremely severe pains in his
feet and hands with the loss of dexterity of both hands and legs
at the onset of the pain. This pain was very severe and he lost
a great deal of sleep. He states that this was the most
difficult period of his entire imprisonment. He had no
medication, and the pains lasted until the summer of 1943, when
he received quinine because of malaria. This seemed to have some
analgesic affect upon his neuritic pains. In Aug. '42, patient
began to notice evidence of scurvy. He noticed a gradual
increase of irritation in his mouth. He had painfulness and
rawness extending throughout his entire mouth and down his
throat. A few limes were smuggled in to him, and this seemed to
help some. This condition persisted for several weeks. After
recovery, his tongue seemed sore and his mouth was numb. His

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teeth were loose during the severe stages. Symptoms of pellagra
began during Aug. '42. He began to have red, scaly, rough, edgy
areas around the back of his hands and legs. This later spread
over most of his body. Itching was the main symptom, especially
around the groin and testicles. Scratching, due to irritation,
caused infected areas of crusty skin over his genitals. During
this time, between Feb. '42 and Dec. '42, his diet consisted,
principally, of polished rice, supplemented with one to two
ounces of fish. There were no fresh or green foods, but he did
get sugar. There was no definite treatment given him during this
time. In Dec. '42, patient had his first attack of malaria which
was extremely severe and
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William H. Montgomery,
1st Lt. AC
caused him complete loss of motion of his legs for about two
weeks. For the following ten months, he had recurrent attacks of
malaria about every thirty days. He had no quinine until Oct.
'43, about ten months later, when he began to get thirty grains
of quinine per week and which he took all in one day. This was
discontinued in Jul. '44, and he soon had a fever. He was then
treated with a complete course of quinine and since then there
has been no recurrence of the disease. In Sep. '42, the patient
began to notice decreasing vision. There was a fuzziness in his
vision, increasing for several months and since that time, the
degree of visual loss has been up and down, and he states that
it is very spotty, and his visual field is full of holes where
he can't see anything. He has had no pain in his eyes, but he
has noted that strong sunlight causes some headache. His central
vision, he feels, is the most affected and his peripheral vision
is fairly good. In Apr. '43, he first noticed some diminished
hearing, although previously he had noticed some tinnitus with
quinine. He had a pronounced deafness in Mar. '43, but this
condition improved markedly in the following three months. Loud
radio music and static are especially jarring now and almost
painful. From Jul. '43 to Nov. '43, he had small blisters on his
arms, legs and buttocks. These ruptured easily and became
secondarily infected, often becoming abscessed and requiring
lancing. He received sulfa drugs, neoarsphenanine and wet boric
acid soaks. The boric acid soaks seemed to be the most
effective. Near the end of this course of illness, the patient
had three very severe malarial chills, and he thinks that this
helped to clear up the blisters. In Aug. '44, patient developed
dengue fever. He states that he had a fever, nausea, aching
joints and throbbing headaches. His fever dropped to normal

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after five days but later went up to 105 degrees. This was
followed by a mental depression which soon left him. Patient had
some rather intensive vitamin therapy, starting in Jul. '44,
after which he began to notice a decrease in most of his
symptoms. At the time of his recapture, he was getting 180 grams
of polished rice per day and 30 to 50 grams of fish per week.
Physical examination reveals the following: Apparent
reduction in the sense of smell. Optic atrophy, bilaterally,
with temporal pallor of both discs, more severe on the right and
central scotoma. There is slight numbness of the lips and
reduction in the sensation of the distal part of the tongue.
Hearing is reduced bilaterally, more marked on the right.
Strength in both arms is good and there is no atrophy. Biceps
reflex is markedly diminished on the left. There is slight
numbness in the finger tips bilaterally, knee jerks are equal
bilaterally and ankle jerk present and active on the left, and
absent on the right. Strength in both legs is good, and there is
no atrophy. A marked reduction in all sensory patterns from the
midthigh down in both legs, more marked on the right. There is a
marked loss in deep sensation and position sense in the legs and
toes. Heel-knee test was done poorly in both legs, with ataxic
gait. Vision: OD 20/100, no improvement with pin hole; OS
10/400, with pin hole, 20/400. Optic atrophy, bilateral,
involving maculo-papular
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William H. Montgomery,
1st Lt. AC
bundle, severe, probably due to nutritional deficiency. Patient
has progressed for some months in this hospital, without
particular improvement. He has had physiotherapy and
occupational therapy. He has been presented to the NP staff
conference and the decision was reached that the patient should
be retired from the army for the above mentioned physical
disabilities.
The officer was asked if he had any other complaints or
anything relative to his case that he would like to bring to the
attention of the Disposition Board or if he had any questions
that he would like to ask the Board and he replied, "No.”
It is the opinion of the Disposition Board that this
officer is now qualified unfit for military service, be ordered
to appear before an Army Retiring Board.