CHAPTER FOUR

Chapter IV

Christmas morning of 1943 was a foggy, rainy dirty morning that gave no indication that it represented any special day. I wandered aimlessly up and down the compound trying to see or hear something that would indicate to me that it was Christmas. Suddenly I thought of the front gate and its view into the street, and I said to myself, “I’ll see something that will help to give me the Christmas spirit.” All I saw was a gloomy deserted street with no indication that they saw this day any differently. A Japanese guard was walking his station backward and forward in front of the prison wit his coat pulled up around his neck looking perfectly miserable. I said to myself, “I wonder if this day means anything to him and if he has a family that he would like to be back with as much as I.” On the spur of the moment, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the last package of American cigarettes that I had. I whistled at the guard and turned and walked away. As soon as I did, I thought, “You fool.” Cigarettes were two hundred dollars a package, but do you know to the first person I passed, I felt like saying, “Merry Christmas.” I then realized that I had been looking in the wrong place. The spirit comes from within, and all we have to do is to give it a chance to show itself. I was further awed by the fact that this Japanese guard was later pointed out to me as the only Christian Japanese assigned to Bilibid. God indeed works in mysterious ways.

We all began to get a little stir crazy and to look for something that would break the monotony. We heard that the Japanese ran their trucks on sugar, alcohol and gasoline mixed. The truck depot was just outside the prison wall. Someone came up with a piece of rubber hose and a three gallon can. We dug underneath this electrified wire, not thinking or really caring that the slightest miss-Q would have electrocuted us, and made it to the trucks. Everytime a Jap guard would go on the other side of the trucks, we’d jump out and siphon some of the fuel out of the thank until we thought we had enough. We scampered back under the fence, covered up our hole and proudly displayed our prize. We took cotton and tried to strain the gasoline out of the sugar alcohol. It didn’t seem to work so we said to heck with it and drank it anyway. One- armed men fought one- legged men; sick men got up and walked. One prisoner of war building was completely chaotic. The American in charge told the Japanese we were out of our minds so they locked us up and left us alone. For a week everytime I burped, I’d taste gasoline. We were afraid to smoke; we were afraid if we lit a cigarette, we’d blow up. But miracle of all miracles, we all came out of it without any lasting effects.

Now it might occur to some that if it was that easy to get out of prison that we might have escaped. The Japanese had us divided into squads of ten, and we were informed that if one of us escaped, they would shoot the other nine. We were already aware that they believed in mass punishment and our rations had been cut drastically at times for some violation that we had no control over.

One of the most unusual things that came to light was what a man will do for a cigarette. I don’t think there has ever been a hard drug that has created the desire within people that cigarettes have to certain individuals. When cigarettes became almost impossible to get and we were limited to one- half a canteen cup of rice twice a day, I have seen men trade three days complete rations for one- half a cigarette and literally starve themselves to death. We had a chaplain who called everybody together to inform us that we were Americans and should not stoop so low as to pick up cigarette butts. About that time, someone threw one away and there was a free- for- all that lasted about fifteen minutes. We would smoke a cigarette until it got so low that it burned our lips. We would then put it out and save the few strands of tobacoo. When we had enough, we would re- roll it into another cigarette. Now the best cigarette paper that we could find was a new testament that floated around from person to person. We made an agreement with the good chaplain that it was all right to tear out a page if we would all read it before we tore it out. This promise became a sacred trust, and no one ever dared use a sheet of this testament unless at first he read it.

Truckloads of prisoners began to drift in to Bilibid with storied of other camps. In Camp O’Donnell where the prisoners were taken in the Death March, American prisoners died at the rate of sixty a day, and Philippines at the rate of three hundred a day. The dead and dying exceeded the living so much that they were dragged into piles outside the buildings where they were left until doziers could excavate holes to push them off into. Dysentery seems to be the primary cause of death. We heard that some of the corpmen instead of giving the sulfa- thizol to sick Americans, traded it to the Japanese soldiers who almost all were infected with gonorrhea. The Japanese thought that all American prisoners evidently had access to sulfa-thizol so they bugged us all the time to trade them some. We decided if they wanted sulfa- thizol, we’d give them sulfa- thizol! We managed to get a little plaster of paris and a handle on a safety razor and ran off a hundred sulfa-thizol pills. For these we received one- half gallon of mongo beans. For some strange reason, we never had any repeat customers.

During the entire time at Bilibid the Japanese allowed one Red Cross package to come through. They contained a few cans of food and one carton of cigarettes. Even though this helped, it only made a small dent in our needs. From some strange source some kind of black market commissary sprang up. Either some Japanese were being paid to look the other way, or they were operating it themselves. One canteen cup of peanuts, nineteen hundred dollars; one can of corned beef, seven hundred dollars; one carton of cigarettes, two thousand dollars; one banana, seven hundred dollars. As can be seen by these prices, this food was not for the likes of us.

One day one of the prisoners came to me and wanted to read a book that was being passed around. His face was so familiar that I knew that I had known him sometime in the past. Suddenly it came to both of us about the same time. We were from the same hometown, a town of about five hundred people. We had not seen each other in many years. Needless to say, we were a comfort to each other and spent many otherwise monotonous hours reliving some of our early days.

We had begun to sense upcoming activity by some undercurrent that was unexplainable. We began to realize that some more was going to take place. Truckload after truckload of prisoners began to come into Bilibid from Palawain, Cabanatuan and other Japanese prison camps. It was apparent that Bilibid was being used as some sort of prisoner concentration to facilitate Japanese plans. All of the physically handicapped patients were loaded into trucks and transferred to a barracks at Ft. McKinley on the outskirts of Manila, evidently to make room for more newcomers.

We had no sleeping facilities except blankets which were placed side by side on the floor, and we were restricted to the building and to a very small area about twenty feet wide surrounding the building. In the next aisle to my blankets, there was an old fellow who had evidently saved his cigarettes and used them to barter with. Every meal he was completely surrounded with canteen cups while several starving men sat and looked wistfully at every bite he took. About two o’clock one morning, I was awakened by someone thrusting a canvas bag into my hands and whispering desperately for me to meet him downstairs. In my half awakened condition, I could only recognize “Blackie,” an Oklahoma Indian, who slept next to me but had no idea what I was holding or why. I was half way down the steps before the commotion upstairs made me realize that I had become involved in something that I most definitely wanted nothing to do with. I stepped into the latrine at the bottom of the steps, threw the bag into a corner and started bac upstairs. At the bottom of the steps, I met the American captain in charge of our prison group. It seemed that our old man had been relieved of his cigarettes. Each time I would look at Blackie, he would turn away; and I knew that I was going to receive no help from him. Most of the guys were glad that it had happened, and my punishment was to crack coconuts for the Japanese. This did not amount to punishment because most prisoners wanted this detail so that they might eat coconut. This episode made me realize how easily a person could become involved in some illegal activity without being fully aware of his complicity. I think I more clearly understood our judicial rule of innocence until proven guilty without a reasonable doubt.

We received a message through the prison grapevine that shocked and saddened us all. The prisoners that had been assembled at Bilibid were loaded onto a ship and added to a convoy going to Japan. When the convoy left Manila, the ship carrying the prisoners was the last ship in the convoy and was so reporter by the Philippino underground to American intelligence. Later, they changed positions and moved the ship up to the center of the convoy. American planes attacked and sank the prisoner ship killing several hundred American prisoners. How these men must have felt to see American planes for the first time in over two years and have to remain helpless while they were strafed and bombed by instrument of their own government.

After staying at Ft. McKinley for about thirty days, we were loaded up and moved north to the Japanese farm and prison camp of Cabantuan. This was a huge camp spread over about a hundred acres, fenced and guarded by watch towers uniformly spaced around the area. Here all the men still able to work, left in the Philippines, were imprisoned. Malaria, dysentery, and food deficiency diseases were taking their daily toll. We learned while prisoners that there is no such thing as bad food. Anything is good that is filling or that sustains life. We who had no special pets at home thought dog meat particularly appetizing, and we began to set traps for any dog who was unfortunate enough to be looking in our area for scraps. Whent eh 4^th Marines were stationed in Shanghai, China, they found a little pup in SooChow Creek. They adopted him, and he became quite a favorite. When they were captured, they smuggled SooChow from camp to camp; and when rations became very scarce, they would each donate a spoonful to keep SooChow alive. Now SooChow, to us, was just a little more meat on the hoof. The Marine prisoners were kept at such an alert if at two o’clock in the morning some dog howled, they would all hit the deck. Due to the protection of the Marines and the intelligence of SooChow, he managed to escape the pot.

We found the Japanese guards to be less regimented than at other camps. They were also easy to trade with and extremely cruel. I know of one case when three prisoners bribed a guard to allow them to slip out under the fence and go to a nearby village. They were late in coming back, and the guards had been changed. The three men were tied to stakes in the middle of the camp and for three days suffered beyond comprehension. Their noses were all split where the Japanese had inserted their bayonettes and lifted them through the flesh. Even after death, their bodies were continued to be abused as an example to the rest of us who might want to visit a village. Another incident I personally witnessed, even though it was strictly against Japanese orders; if you were caught, you were beat unmercifully. Some prisoners smuggled a few seeds from the farm and had hidden behind some building would plant themselves a few okra plants or whatever. I saw this prisoner picking okra with his back to the fence. A Japanese sentry in a guard tower not far away, saw him and yelled at him. He made no motion. The Japanese yelled again and he still made no motion. The sentry kneeled, aimed and shot the prisoner in the back. He climbed over the fence, walked over to the prisoner, took his foot and rolled him over and shot him through the head. In a little while a group of Japanese guards came with a litter, loaded the dead soldier on and attached a sign which stated that this was what happened when you tried to escape. It was explained to me that the reason this prisoner didn’t reply to the Jap was because he had both eardrums burst on Corregador and was completely deaf.

One of the interesting characters that I met at Cabanatuan was a Captain Hornbossle who was the oldest captain in the United States Army. He contracted leprosy while a prisoner in the Philippines and years later, I understand, was cured at the leprosarium in Louisiana. While working at the farm one day, a strange plane flew over; and it was gone so quickly that all of us only noticed that it was strange that is flew over so low. It circled and came back across and wiggled its wings, and we knew that we had just witnessed something that we thought we would never see again, an American fighter plane. Excitement and speculation was rampant. Even the Japanese started grinning instead of growling. The Japanese began to herd most of us into groups in preparation for returning us to Bilibid in Manila.