95712 Quan Pages:95712 Quan Pages - Philippine Defenders Main

The Filipinos risked their lives to save the prisoners and
defeat the Japanese.
Francies, 87, took his latest trip recently, attending a ceremony
for the 60th anniversary of the Philippines liberation.
The slim, blue-eyed vet marches yearly in Memorial Day
parades and gives a slide show about his ordeal to students
and civic groups. He also spoke twice daily during last year’s
opening of the U.S. World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The death-march survivors are making a last stand. An
estimated 60,000 of the 70,000 American and Filipino troops
survived the ordeal, but only 200 were still alive last year,
according to the military newspaper Stars & Stripes.
Francies enlisted in the Army in 1937 and was assigned to
fix radios and telephones with the 228th Signal Operations
Corps. After Pearl Harbor, Washington sent few supplies or reinforcements
to the Philip pines, which fell to Japanese invaders
after a retreat to the Bataan peninsula.
During the march, already undernourished prisoners were
held in a camp for three days and marched for 11, in brutal
sunshine with little water and no food. Locals tried to throw
them food wrapped in banana leaves. The Japanese ordered
them to stop — and killed some who continued.
Many soldiers grew too weak to walk. The rest were too
weak to carry them.
“They would fall by the side of the road, only to be shot, but
more often bayoneted,” Francies said. “There was nothing, nothing
we could do but to look straight ahead and keep on walking.”
Francies finally sneaked into bushes and collapsed. A
Japanese medic secretly gave him a shot that revived him.
The prisoners walked about 55 miles, rode awhile in airless
railroad cattle cars, then marched a few more miles. Francies
was too weak to remember the second walk.
The prisoners finally reached Camp O’Donnell. The
commandant said, “Forget you have names, forget you have
parents, wives and children. Your loved ones no longer care,”
Francies recalled.
The prisoners finally got a little food — wormy, watery rice
referred to as wall paper paste. Many were tortured. Some
were beaten or stuck in tiny cages. Others, including Francies,
had to bury comrades who were unconscious but not yet dead.
When some prisoners escaped, Francies and others were
interrogated and threatened on a firing line for six hours.
Soon he got better work fixing radios — or mostly sabotaging
them and smuggling parts to the Philippine resistance.
Francies endured dysentery, malaria and two cases of
appendicitis, only one of them treated by a POW medic. He
lost about a third of his 160 pounds.
He eventually survived a crammed voyage to Japan and
worked at a copper mine that was hidden in the hills.
When the commander finally announced the war’s end, the
prisoners quickly painted “500 POWs” in yellow on the camp
roof. Then they experienced a little of what they had missed in
three years — a B-29 Superfortress swooped overhead and
dropped something called penicillin.
“Penicillin?” the prisoners painted on the roof. A plane
dropped off instructions the next day.
After the war, Francies spent several months in veterans
hospitals. He said many of his countrymen refused to believe
stories of Japanese torture.
No group of men could have been treated that badly, they
scoffed.
Francies eventually recovered his health and used his electronic
skills for 35 years installing telephones.
He first returned to the Philippines in 1982, during the 40th
anniversary of the nation’s fall. He went again in 1997 and in
each of the past four years, sometimes with his two daughters
or with friends. He travels with Valor Tours, a San Francisco
business.
26 — THE QUAN
Memories of Kindness
(Continued from Page 14)
The company’s Vicki Middagh says he is her last customer
from among death-march survivors.
“They’re just getting too old to travel,” Middagh said. “But
the sons and daughters and now the grandkids are taking over
for them.”
Francies plans to keep going “as long as my health holds
up and my cash holds up.”
At home, he keeps busy with the Kiwanis and veterans
groups. He walks regularly and audits classes at Cleveland
State University.
Francies hates how the United States has turned the tables
lately, holding untold numbers of prisoners indefinitely and
apparently torturing some.
“It just bring us down to Japan’s level,” he said.
Many elderly veterans warn youngsters to be prepared for
war. Francies wants them to be open to peace.
“Nobody wins a war,” he said.
————————
Conduct Under Fire: Four American
Doctors and Their Fight for Life as
Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945
By John Glusman
Reviewer: Jeffrey T. Munson (Dixon, IL)
Author John A. Glusman has written a masterful book
about the horrible conditions Allied POWs faced as prisoners
of the Japanese. In particular, this book concentrates on the
lives of four American doctors; Lt. George Ferguson, Lt. Fred
Berley, Lt. John Jacob Bookman, and Lt. Murray Glusman. All
were stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked
shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
After enduring the defeat of Bataan, and later Corregidor,
some 78,000 American and Filipino POWs were forced to
march over seventy miles in what became known as the
Bataan Death March. For the next three and a half years,
Ferguson, Berley, Bookman, and Glusman were at the mercy
of their Japanese captors. Food and water rations were virtually
non existent, beatings were barbaric, and the doctors did the
best they could to help the sick and wounded with virtually no
medical supplies at all.
Eventually, the doctors were loaded aboard Japanese “Hell
Ships”; overcrowded freighters converted into ships to carry
POWs to mainland Japan. The conditions on the ships were
worse than in the camps. Men were placed in vastly over -
crowded and stifling holds, given virtually no food or water, and
were unable to even lie down due to the crowding. But the
greatest fear faced by the POWs was attack by American
submarines. Once torpedoed, the Japanese were known to
machine gun the surviving POWs in the water. Indeed, George
Ferguson died when the ship he was on was torpedoed.
Once in Japan, the remaining three doctors were once
again placed in concentration camps where they tended the
wounded and sick. But as time wore on, they soon began to
see hundreds of American B-29 bombers winging above them.
They surmised that the Americans must be close to winning
the war. However, they still had to endure the firebomb raids of
Kobe and Osaka that virtually destroyed cities. However, after
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of
1945, the Japanese finally surrendered, and John, Murray, and
Fred were finally able to return home.
This is a spectacular book. John Glusman does an excellent
job of describing the fall of the Philippines, the Bataan Death
March, and the atrocities that the POWs faced at the hands of
the Japanese. My favorite part of the book was the extremely
vivid description of the firebombing raids on Japan in the spring
of 1945. I give this book my highest recommendation. Read and
see how four ordinary men from the heartland of the United
States managed to survive against a brutal and unforgiving
enemy.