This is an interview with Mr. John B. Brush, 2
Beach Knoll Drive,
Cincinnati, Ohio, 45224. Mr. Brush's telephone
number is area code 513-521-5774.
Now, John, with that, having gotten that out of
the way, let's ask you first of all,
first of all, where were you born and when? I
was born in New York City in
November 25th, 1912. Okay, and were you, tell
me about your parents, what were
their names? My father was Dr. Frederick L.
Brush and my mother was Florence Ann
Bullen, Rush, and Dr. Florence Annals, both doctors.
That's really interesting. Were they both, are
these medical doctors?
Medical doctors. Well, now were they... How did
they get to be doctors?
Quickly. Well, yes, on my father's side, there
are only four
generations ahead of me and the man who fought
in the American Revolution,
brush on my masculine side, a brush fought, he
was a captain. On my mother's side she
was born in Cornwall and left there when she
was about 19 or 20 because her
father had been crushed in a clay pit accident
where the clay overboard and
crushed him. So it blew the family apart and he
came to the U.S., she came and her
Her older brother brought her here because he'd
come six years earlier and he became
a doctor.
In fact, Victor Bowen, the brother, was in the
same class in New York Medical College
with my father.
And because they were both penniless, they
chummed together, they had no money, they
worked on the same cadavers and all that.
And my mother, she was educated in a little
tiny school in Cornwall and then she went
to St. Stephen's.
They lived in St. Stephen's in Brownhill and
then she went to a bigger town and got a higher
level education. She'd bicycle 10 miles a day
to go to and from school. Then she went
to Truro, Cornwall, and got a high school
education in Truro. And then she was brought
to the States, and her brother put her through
the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia.
the man that ran it, who was the father of this
famous woman.
Can you hold it for a second? Sure.
Now you can start it.
The Kellys financed this women's medical
college in Philadelphia.
Only women were in it.
My mother was one of 13 graduates in a 19-3,
and then she went to Boston on recommendation
of her brother, and there she met my father,
but he was already married with two children.
She became a friend of his family, and then his
wife died at the birth of the third child.
After two years, my father married my mother,
and then I was born.
Long, tricky deal.
Very good. Well, that's not unusual in those days.
All right, 1912, and you were living in New
York City.
Well, then my father was appointed medical
director of the Burke Foundation in White
Plains, New York.
And that's a fantastic place, founded with $10
million in 1910, privately founded for
the working people of New York City, free for
them to come out and get two to six weeks
of convalescence.
It was a convalescent hospital, the largest
private convalescent hospital in the United States.
And my father was medical director and my
mother, after a few years, became the doctor
for the women it was half women half men and so
I grew up I went there in 1915
and I left there permanently in 1934 when I
graduated and went to work.
Alright, let's kind of look through those years.
You obviously went to grade school
there did you? Grade school in White Plains.
High school. And then high school in White
Plains and went right from there to Cornell.
No, tell me when you graduated
from high school. 1930.
1930, and then you went to Cornell beginning in 1931.
Yeah, I graduated in 1934.
Now let's talk about your schooling.
What did you major in?
I majored in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell.
I got a degree. It's an M.E. degree.
It's not a Bachelor of Science.
It's a Mechanical Engineering degree.
It's the only college in the U.S. that gave
that degree.
It had practical courses, foundry and all that.
Well I was crazy about machinery from the time
I was five years old.
So you were a natural?
I was a total natural.
I never thought of doing anything else.
I never thought of becoming a doctor.
And he took me through a dissecting room.
Well maybe you like the looks of the table. Yeah.
you graduated in 1934. Well, you went in at 31
and came out in 34. Is that three years?
No, let's see, in high school in 30. Yeah,
that's right.
Well, that's right. We did say that because 1931-1934.
Yeah, I graduated high school in 1930.
That's right. That was my mistake.
All right, now what happened after college?
Oh, well, pit of the Depression, 1934.
Only two major corporations interviewed engineers
or interviewed on the Cornell campus in the
spring of 1934.
and Procter & Gamble, Eastman Kodak, and
Internet, IBM, IBM, but they didn't even
interview in the campus. They wrote to the head
of our
placement and said, look, have you got anybody
you'd like to recommend to join our company?
I never interviewed him and the man gave mine,
I was third from the top of my class in mechanical
engineering, and he gave them my name and they
sent him a letter and said, yeah, well
give Mr. Brush an offer for $18.75 a week and
Procter & Gamble and Eastman were offering
$25 a week, so I made a decision to take $25
instead of $18.
On those days, you would, if you thought about
it, and you probably didn't know a whole lot
about any one of the companies, particularly.
Well, both of them took us, and there was a
group, took us to their factories and their
head offices, Cincinnati, Dr. Gamble, and
Eastman in Rochester,
and gave us a day of looking at, or the
engineers looking at the machinery in
the factory, talking to all people, they
assigned people to talk to us, and
then treated us to a dinner and then sent us
back home. The Procter and
Gamble people were the friendliest and I just
say the nicest people that I had
met in this whole sequence.
Here in Cincinnati.
In Cincinnati.
Met him in Cincinnati.
And, of course, I met him on the campus when
they interview on the campus first, and the
first interview, and then an invite or no invite.
I took care of this recruiting for the
engineering division for some years, so I was
deep into it.
I knew all about it.
anyway, so I chose Procter & Gamble and I liked
to get out of the East and it
turned out to be very fortunate for me, except
for being in prison. They put me
in prison. They put you in prison? Well, that,
we'll get to that. Okay.
I'll tell you how they did it.
They'll just hang that right there.
Hang that up.
So how long did...obviously you stayed with
them a long time.
Forty-two years.
Yes, okay.
So let's get ourselves up to where you finally
decided or somebody decided you maybe should go
into the service.
Let's get to that part.
All right. Before that, right at that time, the
chief engineer of our Manila factory had told
the company that he was going to quit the
company, and he wanted to come back to the
States. A very smart man.
Here we go. So the chief engineer of our
company came to me in Cincinnati and said,
John, would
you like to go to Manila and become chief
engineer of the Procter & Gamble factory there?
It was called the Philippine Manufacturing Company.
The year is now what?
The year is now February of 41.
Forty-one, okay. Yes, and so I he told me I
walked down the hall about 40 feet
turned around and come back said yeah I want to
go because I'm full of
adventure. All right let me ask you this were
you were you married at the time? I
wasn't married at the time I accepted the job
but I was. We'll carry on from there.
I was going with a girl, a very young girl, 21,
20 years old, and I was 29, and so I
proposed to her, and the way I did it was to
say, would you go with me to the
Philippines? Because she, you know, 20 years
old, I didn't want to spring it on
after she said yes I'll marry you but we'd been
going together and so so then
I was married before I left the state we were
married months before I left the
state we left the state. And where was she from?
Was she a Cincinnati girl? She was a
Cincinnati girl her father was a doctor. Oh
that's interesting. She was born and
brought up in Cincinnati and she had a severe
auto accident and was in a coma
for a month when she was 16 and all that and I
helped her recover and that kind
of set up a bond. I taught her French. Anyway,
so we took off and here we are.
We spent five days in Honolulu on the way out.
We took the boat to Honolulu and
And we flew from Honolulu to Manila in the old
China clippers.
All right. That's interesting. Yeah. Well that
came up in the war and all that.
So we went to Midway wake Guam and Manila. We
fly at 110 miles an hour and the
Goonie birds would go right by you gliding.
They didn't care that they didn't have as much
wind resistance.
No, no, they could glide.
So then we got to Manila about in April of 41,
and I took over the duties of chief engineer of
the factory.
And there were many problems and quite some
serious ones.
I don't know how deep you want to go into the problem.
Well, I'll tell you what I'd like to do is to,
on the problems with your machinery and so forth,
let's think about that.
What was the civilian population?
What was going on in Manila at this time
as far as any kind of concern for the Japanese?
What were you?
Yes, well, I'm not having studied Japanese history
and what they were doing in China and all that.
I've done a great amount. Ready?
And, of course, I was busy learning this new job
as chief engineer.
And I didn't mix with a lot of people in Manila.
I was a member of the Manila Polo Club,
but I didn't use it at all.
But no people that I talked to expressed any concern,
serious concern, that the Japs were going to
take Manila
are going to attack me, attack the U.S. So I
paid no attention to it and that's
where I was stupid. Even though there were a
lot of things going on between
Japan and the United States, of course, that
may not have been something that was
broadcast. Yeah, it wasn't publicized. I knew
that there were talks going on and
and that the talks weren't producing any
peaceful resolution.
And I knew that MacArthur was rebuilding the military
in the Philippines on Luzon.
I knew that stuff was coming in.
They were bringing in P-40 airplanes and bombers
and we were making shortening,
gardening, margarine, and soap, two or three
kinds of soap, and shipping it to Corregidor
and Bataan.
So we were in the business of supplying the military.
Were you aware that they were caching that for-
Oh, I knew they were caching it.
I knew they were storing it for an eventuality.
there was nothing, no inference that it could
happen within a year or more than
a year, no inference that it was coming soon.
Was there any time at all that you
can recall prior to the actual assault on Pearl
Harbor, any time at all where
there was a any kind of a notification of
American citizens to get out, to be
alert and to get out? No, no that and that was
testified in Congress by the
Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He testified
after the war they carefully
instructed the head of our government there,
and it's a title, a certain title.
In the Philippines. In Manila. Instructed him
not to dwell on or even infer that
the civilians, American civilians, should leave
Manila. Leave Manila. Not to infer
that because they didn't want to stir the
Japanese to attacking the United
States quickly. In other words thinking that by
pulling them the civilians out
we were getting ready. We were telling them
that we're ready, we're ready to take you, we're
ready to receive you. Well now as you look back
on that now. That's testifying. As you
look back on that now, this is just a question
about this, do you feel any
resentment about the fact. Oh, I totally resent
the fact that the British took
their civilians out. Oh, no. Well, the Dutch
took their civilians out. And you knew that.
And we knew that. You were aware? Well, I would
say they took their women and
children out. Well, that's pretty significant.
Yeah, the Dutch, the French,
and of course the French were chaotic. The
Dutch and the French took their women and
children out some six months before Pearl
Harbor. Well then how did you feel
about you having your wife there? Well I
thought the United States was so
all-powerful and had the biggest fleet in the
Pacific that and since I had
nobody had ever even hinted that our wives and
children should should get out
of the country. But you did see the Dutch and
the British go out. I didn't see
them. I heard about it second or third hand I
heard it there and they went out
quietly. They went out quietly so no news was,
it wasn't printed in the paper all the
Dutch are leaving and all the British are
leaving. Not like it would be today.
So I would just kept drifting along and. Well
you're now into what say the middle
of the summer of 1941? Yeah, middle summer,
June, July. Do you remember about when they
would have been just, you know, I'd be
guessing, when the Dutch and the British
took their people out? I would have to guess
it'd be the same early January or
February of 41 they took them out. Before you
ever got there. You asked if there was
any pre-warning on this attack and after we
were in prison we had, I had a good
friend and his wife, who was the port engineer
for the U.S. Army engineers in
Manila, a civilian, and he told me that he went
into Cavite in about August, August.
He went to a naval captain's office and desk.
Captain was there and after they'd
done their business because this man, his
friend of mine, was heading up the
carrying of barges, towing of barges to
Corregidor and to Cavite with our
products with all kinds of stuff and after
after their business was concluded
this naval captain told him I'll tell you Jimmy
a Japanese and you know the
man he's a well-known civilian in Manila he was
in here last week and he as he
started to leave, he said, well look captain,
in a couple of months I'll be
sitting in your desk. This civilian gave away-
Japanese? Japanese civilian who had
been, they're all primed, all the Jap civilians
in Manila were organized and
primed for the attack on the Philippines. That
it was imminent? That it was
imminent, that it was imminent. They were
primed and what and instructed what to
do when the attack came, mainly to instruct
them what to do when the
Japanese attacked the Philippines. That was all
done in August or September.
This, all right, this person, this Japanese
person who said this to the
captain. The naval captain was U.S. Yeah. And
was the Japanese
I'm a civilian. Civilian of some stature. He
was an important man. Yeah he had
stature, sure he did, and you know a lot of the
Japanese, 25% were
Japanese of stature in the city of Manila. Okay.
There were a lot of us. And as
early then as say late summer then, he made
that statement to this
Navy captain. That one day out? Well it won't
be a couple of months I'll be in
sitting in your chair. I would have I would
imagine that the captain would
have reported that. Yes you would you would
think so wouldn't you? Yeah I'm sure he did
but the people that receive that information
just say pooh. They have
other agendas, don't they? They got other
things occupying their time. I suppose. And in a
couple of months the Jap was sitting, well he
wasn't sitting in the chair
because the cabinet was totally destroyed,
totally leveled. That's right.
Totally leveled, but the Jap civilian thought
that it wouldn't be leveled. No. I didn't see
an impression.
All right. Your primary time is taken up now
with your business.
Yes, tough technical problems and running the
factory. I was responsible for all the
equipment and all the mechanical operations of
all the processes there. We generated all
our own electricity.
Was there ever any kind of input from your
company during this time that said, John,
you maybe ought to start thinking about getting
out of there?
Not the slightest from the company.
Not the slightest hint that things might get
tight in there and maybe you better send your
wife home.
Not even from the company, no.
you tell him that you knew that the British and
the Dutch had sent them? No, no,
I didn't know that. Oh, at that time you did
not know that? At that time I didn't know
that. Oh. See, I said it was very quiet and I
didn't know. I didn't know that they
had sent them out until I was in prison and
British people told me. Yeah, I
didn't know about that. Oh, okay. I was
mistaken. I had no warnings.
Well, where do you want to go from here now?
Well, the attack is kind of
interesting. Okay, we're going to get up to the
attack. We'll go right to the attack on
Luzon. All right, which was the 8th? Well, 7th
of December in beyond the date line.
Yeah, but in your case it was the 8th, December
the 8th. Oh, it's 7 over here, 8
over there, you're right. My case was the 8th
of December, you're right. That's when
the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Now that was
midnight in Manila, midnight, and
they all the officers were at the Army and Navy
Club dancing and drinking it up
and having a good time. What were you doing? I
was at home and asleep in bed
going to work the next day or yeah. The next
day was Sunday. No, it was Monday.
That was Monday. Yeah, so I was asleep and
Can you cut it? Sure. John, let me let me ask
you this question. When was the
first time that you had heard that Pearl Harbor
had been bombed. Okay, the answer
to that is the morning I went to work after
Pearl Harbor was bombed. The
morning after the, yeah, because you said it
was midnight the night before. Yeah.
With actual time. Yeah, of course, this is. Yes.
What were date lines? Date lines and
hours 12 hours later and all that kind of stuff.
Yes. A lot of time in there so it
wasn't. But you didn't learn. Pearl Harbor was
bombed on 7 a.m. and. 7 a.m. in Pearl
Harbor but that was midnight. That was midnight
in Manila. In Manila. That's the thing.
Exactly and you were in bed asleep so you
didn't hear about it. Never. Went to work.
I went to work that morning and the
superintendent told me about it and said
well look we better get set. Now I'm going to
ask you something first.
Somebody why you walked in the you walked into
my office in your office and
somebody is there and says what? No I walked in
sat down and started to work
and I don't know whether... Everybody knows
where they were when they were heard
about Pearl Harbor. Where were you, what were
you doing? I had gotten up and had
gone over to talk to my boss and he said kind
of, by the way, we've got some kind
of a message that Pearl Harbor's been bombed.
Okay, some kind of a message, is
that right? That's the way I remembered it.
That's fine. Nobody just rang the alarm
bell in the office said, hey, Pearl Harbor's
been bombed. Nobody did that.
Oh, okay, that's all right. It was the quietest
thing you've ever heard. So, what did
you say? I say, so what? I mean, I don't know
what, I mean, maybe they bombed it
and all their planes were shot down. I don't
know anything about it. So, I just
I just passed it off, and I went about my
business that day, and I went.
So, that was a rather unique way to find out of
such a huge thing that had happened.
What did you do when you found out about it?
I just went to work.
I just went back, sat down, and there's nothing
I could do about it. I can't chase him away.
Pretty blasé, all right. Well, yeah, you have
to be. I know. Go ahead. What happened after that?
So then I finished the time, the daylight time,
at the factory and went home.
What time would this have been? I would get
home about 6 p.m. and then I
think, and we had dinner. We had a houseboy and
a cook and a laundress.
And we had dinner and we went to bed and then
the Japs bombed Nielsen Field and
and they started from the north end, and
luckily they started just at these hangars,
and these hangars were outlined by flares set
there by the Japanese civilians of Manila.
Because it was after dark.
It was 10 or 11:00.
So they basically were spies.
Well, yes, they basically-you'd call them
spies, but they were just-
Carrying out orders.
Carrying out orders of what to do when the
Japanese attacked, and attacked any U.S. place.
And they all, you know, 10 or 20 of them went
out with flares.
They had the flares furnished by the Japanese
military or somebody in the Japanese government.
So they outlined the hangars.
To outline the hangars, and then that night,
the Japs bombers came over from Formosa, the Bettys,
and just laid down five of the hangars there,
just blew them down, and whatever planes were
parked out front of it.
Tell me about that field. That's not something
that we're familiar with.
No. It's a very large municipal airport of Manila.
Oh, all right.
We landed there from Guam.
Well, no, we landed in the bay from Guam in a
flying boat. Yes.
But this was the municipal land field.
You know, it had a 6,000 foot runway,
a good size runway, one runway. Yes.
And not a military field, but the military were
on it.
But it wasn't like Clark Field.
But they had military planes there.
They had some military plane because they were
assembling them in Manila and they would
somehow get them to this airport or take them
off from a highway in Manila and land them on
Nielsen and refuel them and kick them out and
then fly them to Clark Field.
Now how close to this field were you?
They saved my house. Actually, it was about 300
yards off the north end of the Nielsen Field runway.
Yeah. And luckily, on that first night bombing,
they started from the north, and they were-had
accurate things to shoot for,
and they were pretty low. There was no
counter-air activity or no anti-aircraft.
They didn't have any aircraft?
No anti-aircraft on Nielsen Field. They had it
up at Clark Field, but none at Nielsen Field.
I see. And they probably were only about 3,000
feet and they just hit these, hit
whatever they wanted to hit, and so they didn't
hit my house, even though I was
close to it. All right. So then that, that kind
of shook us up. Did you sleep any
that night? Yeah, we went right back to sleep.
Nothing we could do, you can't do
anything with him. He was staying awake. So we
got up the next morning and I went to
work. Just drove to work, left my wife in the house.
Your boss said what? My boss said, well if they're
bombing in Nielsen Field and you live 300 yards
from it, you better do
something, but the first thing you can do is,
you go out in the bodega,
the copra bodega, and get a bunch of jute bags.
All the copra that came into our
factory came in bags, big bags like this, dried
coconut meat, dried meat, about
3% moisture, 6% moisture, and you get all the
bags you
need and build yourself a splinter shelter on
your ground floor, and the
ground floor is about six inches above the
dirt, and the water is only 18 inches
below the dirt so you can't have a basement. Oh
yes, okay. Manila Bay water is only
six inches below the dirt. Below the dirt. It's
a great unit. But so you have a concrete slab
as a ground
floor. That's a ground floor. And so I left
early about 2 p.m. with these empty bags and I
collared up three or four Filipinos that were
wandering around the streets of
this residential area and I said I'll pay you
if you if you we dug up the sand
out of our yard. I mean it's all of Manila is
volcanic ash all volcanic ash so
you just dig a shovel and fill up these bags
and we laid a splinter shelter
about seven feet by seven feet inside. Inside
the house? Inside the house in the
under the main living room on the concrete so
that we could throw a
mattress, two mattresses down there and sleep
and if they bombed again the next
night at least we had a chance that they would
not drop one right in the splinter
shelter. They would drop them somewheres around.
Well, the next day I
went to work but we talked in the office and
everybody said you better get back
to your house. I mean things are getting rough
and so I struggled. I struggled to
I struggled to get back to the house and my
wife was out with a friend and she
struggled to have somebody drive her to the
house. We only had one car and we
arrived after the second bombing of Nielsen
Field in which they started from
the north end and they straddled our house and
one bomb lit 100 yards on one
this side of the house and the other lit 40
yards on the other side of the house.
And when that happened, I called my boss and I
said, well, they're getting closer
every time they come by. And he said, well,
come on out. I mean, Bob McGinley, our
controller, is out here and you come on out and
stay in my house. We'll crowd in
and everything, and I lived, I knew where he
lived, out in New Manila, and they
aren't bombing in New Manila, they're not
bombing out here. And I said, okay, so we spent the
afternoon packing canned goods into suitcases
and clothing into suitcases
and took off late that afternoon for New Manila
and my boss's
house. Then we lived there. We lived there,
three families, and we'd all get
together and go to work in the morning, kept
the factory running, and this during
During this time, the Japs had finally decided
to wipe out Cavite, and we'd see a squadron
of 18 Bettys go flying straight over our
factory at about 10,000 feet, and we'd huddle down
alongside some concrete walls-there were
certain walls in the factory-and they never
dropped a bomb on our factory, and we had big
oil tanks,
but beautiful targets, I mean, you couldn't
miss them.
But they didn't want to destroy the industry of Manila.
They wanted Cavite, and they wanted Clark Field,
and Subic Bay.
And so we'd see the Bettys going over
and destroying Cavite across the bay,
about 15 miles across the bay.
The fact that we kept producing until December 27th.
We kept the factory running while the Japs were
bombing the military.
What did you do with your end products?
We shipped them over to, that's what I'm going
to tell you, we shipped them to Cavite and Baton.
We shipped all of our products to Cavite and Bataan.
Which were basically bar soaps and...
Bar soaps, margarine, shortening.
Oh yes, okay.
Yeah, food and soap.
So your production, from what time on did you
start doing that?
Well, we were shipping to the military, Cavite,
and probably Clark Field and Stubig Bay and all that.
We were shipping to the military starting in
July of 41, so we just continued that after the
Pearl Harbor.
With that in mind, if that's the case, what
happened as far as your civilian population who
might want some of your soap and so forth is concerned?
Oh, we had plenty of soap. We had warehouses
full of soap.
I mean, and HK, who cares? We're under bombing.
No, I know, but I'm just, this again is...
Well, the civilian population can just take
care of themselves.
I was just curious if there was anything that was...
No, we didn't continue distributing. We
probably distributed our products.
We had warehouses in every island, big island,
big city,
and we continued distributing those out to the
little stores called Tiendas. So
we continued and emptying our warehouse. The
answer to your question is yes, we
continued and emptied our warehouse. That's
what I wondered, all right. That's what you
wondered, yeah. All right. Well, of course, we
supplied our own employees first
before we emptied the warehouse. I would hope
so. Yeah. Now, when you're living in this
house you're the manager's house yeah let me
think one second on that Ruth I
kind of think of his last name I should know
his last name I live with my boss
should we pause a second yeah pause can you
hold it I said you're living at the
house we're living in that my boss's house
three families and we had brought
these suitcases with canned goods in it and
some clothing in it, you know, a few
necessities. And we went to work every day. And
this is, you know, only, what, 9th,
10th, 11th, 12th. It's only the 12th of
December. And so we kept the factory
running, we made our products, we packed them
into barges, we have a wharf right
alongside our factory and then there was the
municipal wharf and we took the
products and put them in barges and at
nighttime a tugboat would come along and
and tow those to Bataan and Corregidor.
Cavite was done with, so only Bataan and Corregidor
were lively with American soldiers.
And we kept that going, and none of our tows
were ever sunk or interrupted.
And finally along, I guess it's about the 27th
through the 29th of December, we shut down production.
We had some problems on fuel and fuel oil to
keep the processes running, so we decided
and conferring with other people in the city to
better stay at home.
And that was the end.
We destroyed all of our formula cards, all of
our records.
We burned them because we knew that the Japs
were going to take the city.
the city. In fact, MacArthur just denoted that
the city of Manila was an open city
long about that time. I see. And just had told
the Japs, don't vomit. He said, no,
we're not defending it. We pulled out the baton
and derogatory.
So then we stayed at home, and the Japs came
into Manila on the 2nd of January of 1942.
Now, when you say the Japs came in, are you
talking about the troops? Militaries.
The troops.
The Japanese troops came in.
They began landing.
No, sorry.
We knew all about-see, they began landing up
into the Guyan Gulf, 70 miles north of Manila.
And they began their big landing, and they had
75 ships in their landing fleet, as compared
to our 300 that when we landed at Guyan Gulf.
Well, a little different.
A little different.
But then they started moving down with their
tanks and their troops towards Manila and
towards Clark Field, they wanted to take Clark,
and then they came into Manila, the
troops, and occupied it on January 2nd. And
then they announced the next day,
every civilian, stay in their own home, we'll
come and get you. In fact, put you
in prison and we'll come and get you. So don't
be wandering around the streets
or we'll shoot you. Did they say that? Sure.
Yeah. Sure. Oh, absolutely.
And you were still up at the boss's house? I
was still at the boss's house and we
were, you know, let's say 10 miles out of the
center of the city.
So, we just stayed in the house and then on
January 5th, two days later, a JAP truck came
up with a lieutenant in charge of about six
soldiers and we were eating dinner at 6 p.m.
And we all stood up and bowed at him and they,
they, the lieutenant said, oh, in good
English, he just said, oh, continue, finish
your dinner. And we were just eating
dessert. You can hardly eat. And so then he
said, now I want you to all get food and
clothing for five days and we're taking you
down to Billmore Hall in the Bay
Area and you're going to stay there till we
decide what we're going to do with you,
where you're going to go. So we packed into
three or four cars, each of the
family had a car, but we were crowded. They
only, they didn't allow us all of
our cars, and we followed them down, one ahead
of us, one behind us, and they took us to
this big university building, the University of
the Philippines building, and dumped us out.
We went into this building, got lined up on the
first floor and counted off, and they
were counting us then.
So many had come in just now, and they were
keeping count, and they said,
sit down where you are with your suitcases.
Just sit down.
And we had canned goods with us, so we could
open up a can
and have a little bite to eat.
Well, we didn't open it after dinner.
So then we slept.
We slept there on the floor.
And the next morning, we got up, and the
captain came by,
and he said, no, we're going to take you to, well,
they didn't tell us just where they're going to
take us.
We're going to take you to a prison.
And they took the women first, and I
saw my wife get together with 20 other women,
and they put them in trucks, and they just vanished.
We never knew whether we'd ever see each other again.
Never, no clue as to whether we'd ever see.
They might have taken them to one prison
and were gonna take us to another one
and all that kind of effort.
So then about two hours later,
they lined up our group of men.
There were about 500 or so foreigners,
foreigners to the Japs, enemies,
enemy civilians on the right were in
Billmore Hall and they had to take several
shifts of trucks
and they they took us out to Santa Tomas
University, the
Spanish University of the Philippines, and went
through the gates and we took
our suitcases out, put them on the ground, and
there my wife was in there already. That's how
we met again.
relief yeah yeah and uh before we get deep into
Santa Tomas help me to
Villamor Villamor v-I-l-l-a-m-o-r-e okay good
good that that gives the transcriber a little help
oh yeah all right so then you the two of you
were reunited. Yeah. Just a few hours later. A
few hours later we were reunited. And where did
they, where did you spend that first night? Oh,
we were not the first prisoners put in there
and we already had made up our own groups and
gotten a kind of a boss going among the prisoners
and the Japs said, look, you've got to set up
your prisoners like on dormitory
style. This was a university building,
beautiful four-story concrete building,
and you put men in one room, women in another,
back and forth, alternate or put
women clustered on one floor and men up the
next floor, whatever way you see fit.
So we just somehow, I got hold of somebody and
he said,
oh, you're in room 55 up on the second floor.
And I went up there with my suitcases.
There was 30 other men, all strangers, mostly strangers.
And we just, we had blankets.
We had blankets.
We were known enough to have a blanket in a suitcase.
We put the blankets on the ground and on the floor.
And I don't know.
That was that night.
I've forgotten now whether we - I got together
with my wife and we opened a can or two and
ate that.
I can't -
Where was she?
She was -
In another room.
These were closets. Closets.
these were classrooms. Yes. She was in another
classroom on the floor below and
way down the other end of the building. This
was a huge building with a patio in
the center, big patio. In fact, it had only
classrooms on the outside wall and
the hallways around the patio. Spanish built,
real Spanish, but it was earthquake
It had been built to stand, we had a big
earthquake right in the building and nothing
came down.
They had triple columns on the corners and all
that, and the guy that designed it knew
what he was doing, plus the fact that the
building was on volcanic ash and it's a sponge
and it was full of water.
Oh, so it took a lot of the shock. Oh, yeah,
the building just, well, you could feel it, the
building was just rocking back and forth.
So it wasn't hard, granted, hitting the bottom
of the building or hooked to the building and
shaking, breaking the columns off like the
highways in California.
What was my boss's name in the prison camp, do
you remember?
Do you remember Bob McGinley's name and Ruth?
Ruth was his wife.
Not having been there at the start. Yeah.
As you know, this is my second wife.
Anyway, so we got organized when we got up and
we said,
and you've got three feet for your mattress or blanket,
and then we're gonna have an aisle of 18 inches here,
and they're gonna be rowed up here and rows here,
and we got the room organized so it wasn't just hodgepodge.
Nobody fought over a space or anything like that.
Yeah, enough other things at work.
Yeah, what was your feeling at this point?
Do you recall?
Well, yeah, the feeling was, well, this is
about as reasonable as you could expect and
this is not going to last long.
Really, our feeling, we didn't know what
happened in Pearl Harbor.
Our feeling was that our fleet was going to
show up in a month or two and drive the Japs
back out of the Philippines.
That was our feeling we were always optimistic
about, because we didn't have not a word about
the destruction of our things in Pearl Harbor,
and we hadn't gotten the word on the total
destruction of our Air Force in Luzon at Clark Field.
And that, I've passed that over, that happened
in the first, well, the first
Wednesday after the Sunday they destroyed
Clark, Clark Airport, destroyed
Clark Field. We've skipped way over to January
now. Yeah, that's right. Do you want
anything on Clark Field? I can bring it up when
I tell you that in prison we had
civilians that were working at Clark Field.
Herb Marks is my boss's name. Thank
you, Marion. Herb Marks. What do you want to
tell us about Clark Field? We can do
that right here. All right. Yeah, I'll just say
let's go back to Clark Field,
which happened the Wednesday after Pearl Harbor.
The Air Force with their P-40s
were out and some B-17s were out scouting the
seas west of Luzon looking
for any Jap carriers or any Jap boats and they
couldn't find any. Of course the
P-40 can only go out an hour and back an hour
and so they they all came in at
1130 a.m. and they lined them all up wingtip to
wingtip on the taxiway and
they all went in and had lunch. And just as
they were sitting down to lunch, here
comes 200 Jap Zeros in and bombers, bombers
from Formosa and Zeros from a
carrier, and they just wiped out 76 P-40s just
by going right down the road there.
Just wiped the old-some caught fire, some were
just shattered, and some had their
armament blown up and all that. But they wiped
that out, and they wiped out about
half of the B-17s that were there. It was the
stupidest thing in the world to line
up your force, and they had plenty of warning
about Pearl Harbor, you know, where
they'd already done it there. Yeah, they'd
already done it, done the same thing.
That's right. Yeah, so, and I got this from an
eyewitness who was standing on
Park Field and watched it go on. Do you
remember who that eyewitness was?
That would take a struggle. Well, don't worry.
Very nice guy, single man, no. That's all right.
I don't
think I could find Rakov, Rakov is his name,
along with a lot of other the
prisoners. You know, as you got out of the
prison, you tend to say, I want to
forget that. You lived the lowest a human being
can live in prison.
Let's go on with that. All right, so that was
Clark Field and we knew, I knew
personally that Cavite was totally flattened
because we sent our
truck over to Cavite loaded with storage
batteries because they had some trucks
undamaged over there but the batteries were no
good or shot up or something and
they were repairing whatever they could to get
their road equipment back running
and we sent a hundred storage batteries because
we kept a big supply. We had a big
fleet of trucks in the Philippines.
Distributing trucks. So I knew and I
heard from our driver when he came back he told
me what he saw over there in
Cavite. Yeah, it was gone. It's gone.
Okay. All right. Now do you want to fast
forward back to to January where we
We're in there and we've got, yes, we've got
the room organized, we know where we're sleeping.
And then we, of course, immediately found out
that it was full of mosquitoes.
So we've got to get some mosquito nets up.
They call them mosquito bars in the tropics.
And we had to get some mosquito bars up.
Well, how can we do it?
well we can we can set up a big mesh of wire,
fence wire, not barb but just
straight wire and fasten those to the windows
up over our head so we can walk
under them. Then we can just hang our mosquito
nets and we set them up in the
size of a bed. So they were just perfect for
drop hanging your mosquito net up
and dropping it over your mattress. We got
those up first and that took a week
or something like that. Where did you get the
wire? Well, we had all these people in
camp that had all kinds of businesses and
supply houses. I think, I think the
Jap commandant allowed us. We, one of our men,
an executive from some company in
Manila would go to the commandant and say look
we need mosquito nets here.
Manila is is free of malaria because it is not
up to the 200 foot above sea
level. You have to be 200 feet above sea level
on fresh water for the malaria
mosquitos to breed. Oh, I see. And so we
weren't worried about malaria, but
mosquitos drive you crazy. Couldn't sleep. And
the middle is full of normal
mosquitoes. Yeah. So the Japs said, well, if
you can get some wire, I'll let it
through the gate. I'll let your wire in. We,
somebody came in with big rolls of
wire and pliers and wire cutters and everything.
I mean, we could go to a
supply house, a tool house, and get tools. The
Japs let us do that because they had
no plans on what to do with their prisoners and
they knew we were going to
be in there. Actually, they knew we were going
to be in there forever till we
died. They're going to die in there. They told
us that later on. You're going to die
in this camp. They didn't say that this first
day or anything. So they were, we
were taking the load of setting up a prison
camp on our shoulders and we set
up the kitchen. We had cooks from Cavite that
were not killed and they knew how
to get these beautiful aluminum cooking
vessels, you know, 30 inches in diameter
and 30 inches high, big handles on them, this
thick aluminum, you know, which they
used for the Navy. And they brought in, somehow
I had nothing to do with it,
somehow they brought in a dozen of these big
cooking vessels and we set up a
kitchen. There was a kitchen for the university
which served a luncheon and
we just expanded that. I don't know what else
we had. We had two tanks, galvanized
iron tanks we got in with a gas burner under it
so we could heat water under
these two, they were 100-gallon tanks, and I
made tea in that kitchen. I worked in
the kitchen for a period, and I would turn on
the stove, the burner at some
time at night, and then come in in the morning
and keep it going, and I would
make tea for dinner, dinner tea, and boy the
British loved tea at dinner. And we
we got in lead foil packages of Indian tea from
a warehouse that well shipping
had been so tight for since since 1939 since
the start of the war in Europe
shipping just got tighter and tighter and while
it was getting tight every
business in the Philippines ordered triple and
quadruple their normal order
and got some of it in. I see. That's where, and
our warehouses in Manila were
stacked full of all kinds of things.
In fact, one of the things that they got in was
a whole thousand bags of cracked
wheat and stamped on it was a gift of the
American people to the people of
China and it was destined to go to Shanghai and
be distributed to the
people of China. But it was caught, the ship
was caught on the high seas and
luckily wasn't sunk and got into Manila Bay
after Pearl Harbor. Oh, got into Pearl
after and unloaded into a warehouse on the
docks in Pearl Harbor. All the
warehouse were chock-full and then all the
buildings outside of the harbor
area were used to store goods, goods, goods.
Well, these supermarkets, and
most of them are run by Chinese, called the
George Washington supermarket, they
ran into not being able to get their boxes of
Wheaties and cornflakes, so they
overordered and they had excess supplies and
that's really what the camp coasted
on for the first six or twelve months is all
this excess supplies that the Japs
didn't want to eat and the Filipinos didn't
want much of it. So we had canned
goods and in addition to that we got moving
into the first six or eight
months of the imprisonment. The Japanese
allowed our Filipino former employees to
come to the fence and the gate and three days a
week they could bring in a bag
woven out of reed or raffia bag, about that
high, about that big.
He's saying about, oh, what's that, about three feet?
Yeah, three feet high.
A round bag?
A round bag. It actually was oblong like that.
It was oblong, okay.
Oblong bag.
And they would bring in, and we had ways of
getting messages to them.
I'd forgotten the exact detail, but we had...
Did you have runners or somebody who...
We had...
I want to get into that one again,
but I want to finish how we lived.
Yes, please, please.
So, two or three times a week,
my wife and I would get one bag,
and in it would be six bananas,
six duck eggs,
three oranges...
This is tape two, side one, and we'll pick up
at the point where the brushes got
food from their Filipino employees. Do you want
to carry on from there?
Yeah, well they, as they say, they, in the bag,
probably about twice a week for the
or early part of it. There'd be the six bananas
and six duck eggs, three oranges,
and canned goods and corn, canned corned beef
was the most desirable thing
because it'll keep and keep. And we used that
as supplemental to what the camp
kitchen served and the camp kitchen served a
breakfast which consisted of
for a period of two or three months of cracked
wheat cooked up to soften it and
it was kind of like a thick like cream of wheat
that you have here and then at
At some time or other, we might get some
shredded coconut,
a small spoonful of shredded coconut
to kind of flavor the thing.
But we had our own sugar in our possession
that we brought into camp with us, raw sugar,
not refined raw sugar.
and we had salt and pepper, nutmeg.
Oh, you had some of the better things of life.
Oh, yeah, well, I'll get into that
because later on we had mangoes, which you
couldn't get.
Well, this day was where we are. Yeah.
So then we got this breakfast from the camp kitchen
and you lined up 400 or 500 in a row
there'd be 3,000 people in the camp at the time
but you staggered the lineup
but you'd be 300 in a row waiting to get a you
had a tray with a soup plate and a
tin cup and a knife fork and spoon which you
furnished not the Japs you made the
tray or got the tray from a Filipino Japs
furnished nothing all right now
when you said that you had 3,000 people all
broken up into different groups, who
had arranged all of that? Was that something
that the Japanese said, okay,
you get so many here and so many there, or did
you do this yourself?
The Japanese assigned floors available,
classroom floors available. They said
you've got so much. The whole of the building
wasn't assigned to the
prisoners the big building and but they
assigned as as prisoners were brought in
they fill up the first floor and then the
second floor and then the third
floor and then the fourth floor and but they
assigned it by floors and our
people supervised the dividing but the Japs
insisted that only men in one room
and women in another room. Dormitory style,
hanky-panky. They absolutely
stopped that. I mean, they never caught anybody
fornicating. I never saw
anybody taken out and shot, but they were rough
on it.
I'm sure, yeah, but okay, but so you... So our
people, our super, we had our own
supervisors, superintendent, we had our own, we
had a monitor in our room and
anything we wanted to talk about we went to the
monitor and if we all together
didn't like him we demoted him and got another
monitor. What do you mean when
you wanted to when you wanted to say something
to the other group no no no
we wanted to say well this is this is crazy
what we're doing over over in this
part of the room or how do we get these
mosquito wires up how do we get the
wires up you can talk to this head man in our
room we had each man had a head
man yeah that you elected that we elected yeah
and we did it informally
just a bunch of the...and it turned out mostly
that the prominent executives and
mechanics and the people, the capable people,
picked the monitor. I mean, it wasn't
picked by any wino or anybody like that.
So then we had no lunch from the camp and then
a dinner from the camp and the dinner
was the same.
We had a scoop of about one cup full, one U.S.
cup in this scoop and he would dip it
in this big cauldron of rice floating around in
water. They called it Lugau. It
was a thin rice soup is what it was. You'd hold
up your tray and they dumped
one scoop into it. You moved out. That was your
whole starch for the
dinner. Now this was this a prisoner who was
doing this? Oh yeah, all
prisoners. Prisoners handled everything. They
handled everything in the camp. Yeah,
the Japs just furnished the soldiers and the
staff, the officers to run the
soldiers. They, as they say, they hadn't
figured out how to. And so we, we augmented
this. We take this tray back to where we're
going to eat. We ate on the ground
for six months, and we would put our own salt
and pepper on this rice or
whatever, or sugar on it, whatever we had to
season it up. And we had all kinds of
seasoning because that's the seasons, that's
right where they grow the
seasoning. Yes. In the Celebes. And so we would
pep it up enough to eat it.
Then for a while they gave us a scoop of mongo
beans. Now mongo beans are what
they sell in the States for feeding the chicken.
They're a little bean about
3-30 seconds diameter and olive color. Not like
a soybean but
they're obviously the name comes from Mongolia.
They grew them in Mongolia.
It's the cousin of the soybean.
And our cooks knew you had to cook them for
about four hours and they would release some
gel or protein from them so you ended up with
kind of a muddy looking soup and that was
full of protein.
That was our protein for the day, that scoop of
protein because like soybeans it's heavily protein.
you needed. That's what we needed. Well, we
looked back on it afterwards and we
saw some people who had just come out of their
big houses with five servants
having the best of meals. They couldn't stand
even looking at these Munga beans.
And yet they'd go through the line and take a
serving of it and then take
two or three spoonfuls of it and then dump it
into our big garbage cans. And
And they must have dumped 25 or 30% of what
they received in the 1st 5 or
six months in these garbages.
I was one time on the garbage can detail, and
we'd have to take the cans and dump them
down into a trench inside this prison camp.
Nobody took it out of the camp and dumped it in
the camp.
It stayed in the camp.
Was that in that?
It was in a walled area of Santa Tomas,
which was a full city block.
Around the block was a, at times it was a steel wall,
at times it was a brick wall,
but the top of the wall was always 12-15 feet high.
Because even while the university was running,
they didn't want any Filipinos to come in.
If they could get in easily and steal everything,
they get steel, they're starving, aren't they?
Before the war.
So you had a trench dug for-
We dug our own trench by hand in this- Alley.
In this pumice.
Oh, in the-
In the pumice, yeah, right in the pumice.
I was wrong when I said that the Manila Bay water
was 18 inches below the ground level.
Manila Bay was a good eight feet below the
ground level of the city of Manila.
So we could dig a trench four feet deep and
fill it with garbage, and you didn't run into water.
While we're on the subject of waste, what about
your facilities, your bathroom facilities?
Well, this was a university building, and each
floor had a boy's bathroom and a girl's
bathroom on the opposite ends of a hallway.
And the boys had urinals in it and toilets, and
the girls just had toilets.
We went in there and we changed over say half
the urinals and just piped up from the water
supply and provided a showerhead.
We got in showerheads and pipes and all that.
We got in plumbing supplies, we had threading
machines, hand machines, and so we plumbed
up the two bathrooms to have at least four
showers in there for 200 people.
Of course, in the Philippines, you sweat like
mad, but you got used to that and you didn't
go in.
It's cold.
There's no hot water.
It was all cold water.
We were glad to get it. Yeah.
And then, of course, the toilets, the big
problem was toilet paper.
Oh, yes. Now we had, initially, big supplies of
toilet paper stored for a year operation
without a ship coming in.
But that got dimmer and dimmer, and we had one
person and a prisoner set up at the door with a
roll of toilet paper, and he'd hand you three sheets.
And that had to do. Three sheets had to do, and
we had diarrhea all over the place.
But that came a little later, it came about six
or eight months after we were in prison so it
was pretty tough and then people would get in a
newspaper, they were printing newspapers in
five languages in the city.
Did they continue after the Japanese took over?
took over. Yes, they continued that. An
American newspaper, a Dutch newspaper, a
French newspaper, a Spanish newspaper, and a
Tagalog newspaper.
And were they running it? And then, of course,
they ran the... The Japanese had
their supervisors in the editorial department
and, what do you call it?
Censored. Censored. They censored all the
articles, all the ads. The ads kept
coming and the city tried to go on as much and
the Japs said here don't
bother don't let us bother you, you keep this
place running because we're now
part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere. Is that what they
called it? Oh yes, that was there, that was on
billboards 20 feet wide. Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. We love you
Filipinos. You're our brothers, well they
looked the same. Yeah. And we're here to
improve your life immeasurably. You
don't like all those rich greedy foreigners
that took all your money and
let you sweat away in their sweat shops and out
in the cane fields and all
that stuff and so they did try to keep the
Filipinos running in some fair shape
and a lot of Filipinos thought this is great we
finally get rid of those white
people. I'm sure they did.
Okay, well then, so then that was pretty good,
fair enough eating, I didn't lose too much weight
in the first six months, but then we might as well,
we better not take one subject all the way through
because I'll cut it year by year, it'd be better.
And in the first year,
we had our own public address system we got in.
We had the top performers and actors of the city,
and we had these beautiful nightclubs and theaters
and all that in the city,
and these were all enemy POWs, of course.
We had a black man called Bumblebee,
and he was £320, and he looked like a bumblebee,
and he played a tremendous trumpet, just like
Louis Armstrong.
He sang like Louis Armstrong.
He had his own orchestra before Pearl and his orchestra,
there were a lot of blacks in it, maybe all black.
So he would play for us at nighttime after dinner
out on the lawn and everybody loved Bumblebee
and he'd sing and everything like that,
all on PA system.
Then we put on radio plays.
I got into, acted in one of them, or talked in
one of them, not acted, talked, and they
would have a play that would last an hour, hour
and a half after dinner, maybe one
every week or two weeks, a radio play. So the
city, I mean, Santa Tomás picked up
its own life and Shelley Midens who is the wife
of Carl Midens. M-I-D? M-Y-D-A-N-S. Thank you.
And he was the top photographer for Life
magazine in the whole magazine and he did
most of his photography in by traveling around
the world. I guess you'd say he's the top
a foreign photographer. Was he a prisoner? Sure.
Yeah. He's an American, all
Americans. Well, I mean, he was in the
Philippines when they took it over then. He was
in the
Philippines doing a photographic essay and he
was captured when they took it
over. So then Carl and Shelley, Shelley Midens
wrote a book when she was
repatriated halfway through the camp. Two years
after she was in prison there was
repatriation. I can tell you a lot about that
but let's get hold of Shelley
because I want to refer to her book. She wrote
the book, when she got back to
the States, called The Open City. You could
pick it up in any library, The Open
City, Shelley Meisner. And she had, they
treated Carl, because he was a
press man, just like he was a diplomat, part of
the diplomatic corps, that's why
he was repatriated. Because he also was
repatriated. Well, he was, both of them
were repatriated and so they had good contacts
from the outside and the
commandant, the Jap, would let him bring in
stuff and her picture of the camp
was that it was kind of a wild open life there
in the camp. If husband and wife
didn't like each other they just separated. Now
the husband, if he was the
money supply, he would see to it that his wife
had an equal amount of, we always,
you have to have money in a prison camp, that's
another subject, big subject, money, but he
would see to it that his wife was supported,
but they never even talked to
each other and they divorced as soon as they
got out, and there were other people
that picked up with other partners in the camp
too, so there were no laws, there
no U.S. laws in the camp. You just worked on
the Ten Commandments. You worked on the Ten
Commandments. That's all you worked on.
Did you find a lot of, there were a lot of
restrictions and basically in those
first months by the Japanese? By the Japs.
Well, there were no sex. Yeah. But they
weren't. You couldn't, you couldn't leave the
camp or you get shot. If you
started to climb the fence, some guard would
just shoot you back, I mean it wasn't immediate.
But you didn't, it didn't sound, it doesn't
sound like you were suffering terribly.
We didn't, nobody ever put a bayonet through my
leg or anything like that, no we weren't
suffering terribly in that first six months and
we were living on this, our own reserve
food supply, and we had our president of our
company in prison with us, an American.
Oh, you mean this man?
That was not the president.
That's the plant manager.
Oh, excuse me.
That's the plant manager.
And the president handled all the sales and the
finance and the advertising.
Oh, I know.
You know all about that.
This is the plant manager, and I was the chief
engineer, and I reported to the plant manager.
What was the president's name?
Do you recall?
Yeah, I should.
I almost said it, Barry.
Barry was his last name and I can't think of his
first name because we had a Rim Barry at Cornell
who stuck in my mind.
That's fine, but Barry. Mr.
Barry was the president of the company and he
handled all the money, B-R-R-Y, B-E-R-R-Y.
Now that gets us into the money because we had two
Swiss in our company and they were
non-imprisonable as neutrals. One of them
didn't help us a bit. He just stuck to his
house. He was getting money from the
company. What you had to do was have a contact
outside the camp and the other
Swiss, I wouldn't be here except for the other
Swiss, he'll come back, he was the
treasurer of our company, Swiss treasurer, and
he could come in with a Swiss
armband on and the Jap guards would let him
through and he could go to the
commandant says I want to talk to Mr. Barry and
they could get together in a
quiet place nobody could hear him and he could
pass over to Mr. Barry 50,000
pesos which he had borrowed from a Chinese or a
Spaniard in Manila and at a
a discount rate and the worst the discount ever
got to was you paid double after the
war was over and they were betting that you
were, both sides were betting that the U.S.
would finally win.
You would pay, now the peso was worth ¢50 U.S.
dollar at the beginning.
Now the Japs took the peso over and you had
Japanese peso and that was ostensibly, they
called it, that was worth ¢50 to a U.S. dollar.
That was the same value as the Filipino peso
and finally they got to whether they outlawed
all Filipino pesos because people were hoarding
them hoping that they would be
worth ¢50 U.S. at the end of the war. The Jap
peso went to zero, absolutely
zero. You could down the street, clouds of
these bills would fly up in the air.
Zero, just like Germany. So he would borrow
50,000 pesos and come in and
and hand it to Mr. Berry.
And Mr. Berry would pass it out.
I think he would hand me
something like 30 pesos a month.
That's $15 U.S. a month.
And I could,
I could send a little of that back out to my
house boy
or somebody like that.
I could buy some items in camp. When it was the
open city, there was a Swiss there making
Swiss cream chocolates. He could buy chocolate
and sugar and butter and margarine and all
that and make beautiful cream chocolates and
you paid a dollar for one chocolate.
Those days that was a lot of money.
that was a lot of money. Well, it was hard for
him to, he had to make half of that
so he could live and he could buy food with the
half he made. Yeah, that was his
business. Everybody that could make something
that was saleable to a
prisoner made it. If you were a tailor, you
sewed up their clothes, which was
continuous sewing, and you had to pay him.
That's where you had to spend your 30
paces a month on the tailor and stuff like that.
There was always, but that's
the main thing if you're ever in a prison camp,
make sure you have an
outside source of money that can be gotten in
either secretly or like this
Swiss non-imprisonable person bring it in and
hand it to you. What about, did you
obviously share that with your wife? Yeah, oh
sure. No, that was for both of us.
I mean you you you saw you were together with
yeah, we were in separate bedrooms at night.
Yes, but then in the daytime
We had a place that we would kind of get
together with the other
PMC that's Philippine manufacturing company
Other PMC employees Americans that were in
prison and we'd have lunch together that sort
of thing
At dinner we well, we'd have dinner together
sometime now
Now, after six months, when the city was called
an open city
by this author, the Japanese let us build our
own shanties
on the grounds outside of this concrete building.
And since I could get some money,
and then Mr. Barry would give me another 30 pesos
say you you contact and they allowed Filipino
carpenters to come in and
negotiate and build you a shanty. I couldn't
build it and I forgot where
there was 50 pesos a shanty. He built a whole
shanty and it was seven feet wide
and ten feet long. Oh yeah. And then they built
some furniture for us. It had a
a NIFA roof which was watertight. It had
drop-down windows. The walls were all sawali.
That is
split bamboo, as you could put under it, split
bamboo. When I say split, it's split
into strips, oh an inch and a half wide and a
sixteenth of an inch thick. Okay.
And it's woven just straight weaves over under
weave and jammed tight like in a
loom and then they do something with the end so
it doesn't fray out, just explode,
doesn't explode. And it can be, you know, they
make it, they weave it into mats
six feet wide and eight feet tall. Big mats.
And you make walls out of it.
That was the wall of Ushanti. That's the wall
of Ushanti with Suwali and had a
a doorway, and then these covers for the
windows were sawali with a wood rim around
them, and
they just tied them with Rattan. We had all the
Rattan in the world, it just grew a hundred
miles out, and they made hinges out of Rattan,
and you swung this up and then you put a piece
a bamboo under the edge and there you had an
air coming through it.
Well, that's when it was the open city, so we,
Lois and I, would go to our shanty with
our tray with the camp food in it and we had a
table made and we had some chairs made and
The structure of the shanty was bamboo timbers,
that big, six inches or five inches in diameter,
vertical timbers, horizontal timbers, and then
the floor was-I'm trying to be sure
whether we were on dirt, no, we were above dirt.
The floor was the standard Filipino shanty,
which again was split bamboo,
but it was, oh, 5 16th inch thick,
and maybe two inches wide,
and that wasn't woven,
that was laid on bamboo timbers and nailed down.
Yeah, they brought in a lot of nails. We had
all the nails in the warehouse.
Incredible. Yeah, incredible, yeah. Well, the
warehouses, the hardware houses were
overstocked with nails. They had to be bought
and they were bought by
this money that I got from our president. And
this was done about
six months. About six months after we were in,
about in. You didn't sleep in these
shanties? No, that was one of the rules. You
ask rules, nobody could sleep in their
shanty. You had to go back to your dormitory
room to sleep. How many shanties
were out there? Oh my god, we had a name for
everything. Ours, well, the names were
crazy names, just like the nose of an airplane,
of a bomber. We had
villages like with crazy names and there were
15 shanties in my village which
might have been 50 yards long and 10 yards
deep, something like that, 50 shanties, not
everybody got a shanty of course, you had to
have money to get a shanty and there
was five of these villages all around outside
we couldn't put any shanties on
the athletic field, this was a university that
had its own athletic field, but
But these were all in the back and some of the
shanties, my shanty was only 15 feet
from this stone wall and right over the stone
wall was a Filipino shanty with the family
living on it, looking down on it, a shanty town
is what they call it.
Okay, let's go from six months.
Six months and move on.
Let's see, there was something that happened in
the first six months I wanted to cover.
Can you turn it off there for a minute?
Continuing on the food of the camp, my wife
Lois worked in the rice cleaning details.
We had rows of picnic tables and picnic benches.
I think they came from the university.
9:00 in the morning, she'd line up where you
get on these benches with 200 other women.
And our prisoners would bring out bags of rice
and dump them on the table.
And this was two-year-old rice in which was
infested with rice worms.
And a rice worm is about three-quarters of an
inch long,
white body with a black head, an eighth of an
inch in diameter body. And when he
dumped them, the inside of the bag was just
full of cobwebs, rice webs, or worm
webs, not worm webs. And half of the rice would
come out, but they'd shake it and
shake it, and out would come a whole bunch of
worms. So now nobody wanted to
be eating worms with our rice, but we had to
eat the rice, that we had to eat, and so
they would give us, we'd use our own plate,
we'd scoop up some rice and pick out the worms
and throw them someplace on the ground, and
then we'd dump this into a pot that was good
rice, and that was a rice detail, and all these
women did that every morning, cleaning
rice, cleaning rice, yeah. Was it over time
when maybe those worms looked like they
might make good food? Oh, we thought of that,
but it was a little, if this had
happened in the last year of the camp, we'd
have eaten the worms, no question
about it. We'd have just cooked them right up
with them and say, boy, protein, I mean
they're full of protein. We cried about all
those rice herbs we threw away. Let's
get along. This goes for that direction. Yeah,
because things happen every month
and I could just go on for a day. Well, you
can't have that here. All right, so after the
first six months and we had our own athletics,
we had our own soccer teams,
yeah, soccer, baseball, we had baseball games.
That was in the heyday of the
thing when people had energy to do it. No
football, but soccer, our soccer, and
then we had the music. We had our own hospital.
I worked in the hospital for a
time sharpening my hypodermic needles. Carl
Midens, I worked right alongside
Carl, that's when I got to know him, and he was
sharpening needles and we were
both doing it, because you couldn't throw a
needle away after you used it. You had
to sterilize or sharpen it and then sterilize
it. You just kept using these
old needles for three years and the operating
scissors and knives and
everything after two years they all became
rusty, but we tried to sand them
down with something, stone or something, but
they were sterilized and so the
operations were done with rusty operating tools.
Sterilized, but rusty.
Well, let's say... You want to talk about him,
you say Whitcomb? Whitcomb, yes. He was
an Army Air Force pilot and he was went to
baton to fight after his P-40 was
shot up and he were to fall on the front lines
of baton and then as it get got
tighter and tighter and this is April of 42. He
knew things were bad and this was
a brilliant man but 23 years old and then when
Wainwright surrendered to the
Japanese and the Japs said all right you all
get together we're going to March
you to Camp O'Donnell 90 miles up the road." He
said, not me, Whitcomb, Whitcomb
said, Whitcomb said, and he and two other
officers, you could escape because all
was in chaos and baton and Japs had this army
across the exit, land exit, but he
He got hold of a bunker, that's a carved out
dugout, a dugout, and he and these two men
paddled at nighttime across to Corregidor,
which is the first place, and I think he stayed
there a day or something, and of course
Corregidor hadn't been occupied yet, they
occupied Bataan,
And he said, well, Tregador is going to go, so
we better get over to Batangas, which is
another ten miles across Manila Bay, the
entrance to Manila Bay, a neck-down thing.
And so they rode over to Batangas and scattered
into the woods, and the three of them stayed
together and they the Japs had already come
through there to take Manila. That
was already in Jap hands but they were so busy
fighting on baton that they
couldn't garrison every village, every little
village. So the problem of the
American officers was who do we walk up to and
say I'm hungry, have you got me
food for me to eat. But they were sharp and
they picked the right Filipinos and most of
the farmers out in the countryside were
pro-American. It was the Filipinos in the city
that were
turned pro-Jap. And so they got along and they
went from House to house and they were
trying to move up into the northern part of
Luzon, which is high mountains and
impenetrable, and you can stay there for life
if you can get some food, if you can
grow some food or make food, and they were
trying to cross over the main
draft roads to get into the eastern part of
Luzon, and they were caught. Some
Filipino turned them in and called the Jap and
said, hey, these are Americans. They
didn't say they were officers, but they're all
in Filipino
clothes. And the Jap surrounded them and picked
these three men up and they
beat them up pretty badly and wired their hands
behind their back and put them,
threw them into a truck and took them to Fort
Santiago, which is the old Spanish
Fort in Manila, and that was the headquarters
of the Jap Army because it was all fortified.
And they quizzed Whit, that was his nickname,
Whitcomb, Whit, quizzed him up and down, and
he had already, one of these men that he got
together with was a mining engineer from Baggio,
the gold mines up in the north. And Witt said,
I've got to get up a new identity if
the Japs capture me, as before they took him.
And this guy made up a name, a job,
and he was to be the son of the mine manager
who had just arrived in Manila a
week before Pearl Harbor, or they knew when the
last ship came in. I mean, it
wasn't just a week. And they made him an
identity and he coached him on what went
on in a mine, what machinery. They all had
diesel generators and all that. He gave
him a big course in how the mine goes. And when
they took-the mining engineer
was not captured. I think Witt was by himself
when he was captured, that was it. The mining
engineer lived out there for years and he knew
how to get around through the woods,
what Filipinos to talk to and who not to talk
to. Here was this young aviator and he didn't
know anything about the Filipinos. Anyway, they
captured Witt, took him into Santiago.
First, you know, they used to hand him a cigarette
and try to get stuff out of him by sweep.
And they would punch him in the chest,
said, you're an American officer.
You're an American officer.
What unit were you in?
What did you do in the U.S. Army?
And he said, no, I'm Joe Blow.
I'm from Baggio.
And he had the names of all the gold mines up there
or the one that he was working in.
not all of them. And I just arrived here a
month before Pearl and I've been
trying to learn the business of mining gold and
he stuck with it and they beat
him up and they did all kind of, they didn't,
he was not disfigured but they
they were rough on him because the Japs, the
Tempei, Tempei guy are the
secret, the OSS of Japan and they know how to
torture you. Anyway, they never
broke him. They finally said we're tired of
talking to this guy and they dumped
him into Santa Tomás as a civilian with his
phony name and he had no passport, he
had no paper, he says look I've been struggling
and struggling and struggling
and of course they were mystified as why he was
down in the southern end near
Manila when he's supposed to have been up in
the mine and he said well when you
guys landed and the guy on bay I came down
trying to get to Manila but you
were in my way and I came down through the
mountains and I was over here trying
to get trying to get well at that time I was
trying to come down and get to the
army well he didn't say that because they'd
shoot him for that trying to get
Anyway, so he came in, was dumped in, and very
quickly he got a job in the kitchen,
which is always a smart move, get a job in the
kitchen, you're nearest the food.
He was in there and I never saw him there, I've
never seen Whitcomb.
I was making hot water for tea and tea, and
here was this-he wasn't a deserter because
I never-
No, you know who he was.
You're talking about Witt. Witt.
Yeah, Witt.
And he was very quiet, of course, kept to
himself, and finally, well, one day after
After the surrender, the Japs brought in, and
it was a month after that, they brought
in these 20 army nurses from Bataan, and they
took over our hospital, we were using civilian
nurses, and this one nurse came into the
kitchen at 5:00 before dinner and looked up and
She said, Whit, what are you doing here?
Oh, dear.
Because he had known her pretty well from the hospital
on the Tan.
And he just turned away.
Well, he just walked away, didn't say anything.
A couple of our prisoners heard it,
but it didn't click on their heads.
And he walked away, and she knew right away
she'd made a gross mistake, and she walked
away, but he got
hold of her in an alley, in a hallway, and
said, Boy, you almost got me killed there, and he
told her where he'd been and how he escaped and
all that, and she said, I'm terribly
sorry that I almost got you killed, but he then
a month or two after that he
went to the Jap commandant and they were
announcing the repatriation of American
civilians and other civilians to their home
countries. Sick people, diabetes
people and all that. Diplomats, of course, they
had to repatriate the diplomats and
the press. They had to repatriate, they were
repatriated. Damn Carl
Muygens, they didn't repatriate me, they never
came to me. I didn't, I could have
kept track of this. I had only been in the
Philippines eight months and I could
have gone in with a sad story and my wife and
all that. I might have gotten
repatriated. But I, it all was going on pretty
sub-rosa. The Japs didn't want to,
it was not in the papers. They didn't want
everybody to rush in and say
repatriate me. They had their list that they
were working with. But Witt went in
had the guts to walk in and say look, I'm a
mining engineer. In fact, I'm
doing nothing here. I can't do anything in the
camp. I've only been here a month
before Pearl. I think I ought to be repatriated
too. There was some hint in
conversation around the place. Rumor was around
on who was going to be, what
classes were going to be repatriated. And he
picked up on this hint some way. And
And after a week, the Japs put his name on the
list to be repatriated to Shanghai.
The Swedish boat didn't come to Manila. You had
to be repatriated first to Shanghai.
And then the Swedish boat, it would not go to Japan.
And it had the Japanese diplomats from the U.S.
on the Swedish boat.
It came from Lurinco Marques in Africa,
Portuguese Lurinco Marques.
But the Japs didn't want a neutral boat in
Japanese waters.
Shanghai was okay.
So the Maru Jap boat and the Swedish boat met
in Shanghai,
exchanged prisoners of war, one for one, but
before that, Witt was in the British Prisoner
War Camp subjugating the British prisoners of
war, and the British prisoners of war were
in the British Prisoner War Camp.
He was repatriated to Shanghai, was taken to
the Rinka-Marcus, taken to New York City,
and only then did he tell anybody who he
was-anybody except Carl Meidens, which he told
on the
way to Shanghai.
But Carl never gave it out.
He wouldn't do it.
But he was taken off the boat in New York, and
the first American Air Force or maybe
Navy man, he saw the captain or lieutenant, he
said, look, let's go aside. I'm an
escaped prisoner of war from the Philippines,
and I've got a long story
that you guys would love to hear. And he
convinced this guy that he, that was to
tell the truth, and they immediately got him
off to Washington. She created him. He
was a prisoner. She created him so he couldn't
touch, so he couldn't call his
wife he couldn't call his father and mother or
anybody in the world and they
debriefed him and got his whole story second by
second and they
said this is unbelievable totally unbelievable
then they allowed him to
call his wife and they they gave his wife they
first sent a man out there to
instruct his wife what to do and he got she got
a call she was not to do this
this, not to do this, not to tell anybody
because the U.S.
government was so petrified that a story would
get out and the Japs who were
still controlling prisoners of war, military
prisoners of war, which this guy
had been annoyed with. They would take
retribution and or get mad or do
anything crazy that came in their minds. So
about, it took about a month for him
to call his wife and say hey this is Whip and
then they got together and then
he said I want to go back in the Air Force I
want to fly at those sons of
bitches and I want to kill a bunch of them.
They are the worst people in the world
that's my business I can do it I don't want to
sit around here just because
I've been in a prison or been roughed up and so
they did they but they were very
careful in what they did and I think they gave
him and they gave him maybe
the second name he had he wasn't with them at
all and he was incognito and so
then he got on he finally got on a B-25 in
Clark Field after we'd retaken the
field after MacArthur retaken Luzon and all
that and he got on a B-25 and he was
co-pilot, he had the Refresher, Refresher
course, and he flew over Formosa and he
Strafed and he hit several Jap planes sitting
on Formosa. We hadn't taken
Formosa then, and he felt better. And then he
came home, and I know nothing
about how he got to be governor of Indiana, but
he obviously had pushed.
he had a lot of, you know, a lot of gall. A lot
of gall and he could push and push
and push it. Yeah. He ended up as governor of
Indiana maybe for two terms. Yeah.
All right, let's go on. Now that was Whitcomb.
And I want to know about you and those final years.
Final review. Rescue? Thinking about the time
when you said things weren't too
good that last year. Yeah, well, the thing, as
the food, when I was moved to Los
Spanos in June of 43. My wife was moved there
in December of 43. We, I was with
500 men and we started the permanent civilian
camp in the Philippines.
And Los Banos means the bath. The bath. It is
the College of Agriculture of the
country of the Philippines. But it has hot
baths up on this volcano that's right
here you're sitting here on flat land there's a
volcano right here but it's
not smoking but it's got hot bubbly bubbly
baths. So anyway so we've been we
We were separated for six months, again, well,
six months this time, and she came in in December.
But you couldn't hear from each other that same day?
Yes, we had a truck that went down every two
days, and you could send paper messages, and
the Jap guard would look at it, and we'd make
them deliberately innocuous messages, but
we knew each other was all right.
And she could bake a cake and send me a cake,
you know, things like that, a banana she could
and she still had contact with the money supply
down there. I had no contact with
money at all after they moved us to Las Vegas.
Anyway, so we were we were living
husband and wife in cubicles in this barracks
for a hundred people, 50
cubicles. Again, seven feet wide and ten feet
long, but two rows of them with a
hole in between. Sewally walls, nipa roof, but
the columns were hardwood,
Philippine mahogany columns. And anyway, things
got tighter and we didn't get any
food and and they they can't they supply a rice
it probably when we were up
started up there in December of 43 we'd be
getting maybe
1,200 calories of rice a day issued by the
Japanese that came out of their
warehouse but every month they cut it down and
down and down. At the last four
months we were getting 700 calories a day or
and you can't live on 700
calories a day. Now we had saved up ten cans of
corned beef, some sugar and some
margarine in a can, canned margarine, and we
had our own little garden and we
grew sweet potatoes, but we never got a sweet
potato out of it. All we did was
live on sweet potato leaves, which with the
first stem coming out that connected
to the vine, that's edible too, juicy and
edible, and the leaf is green, which has
a protein in the green leaf and we would
collect a bucket, a small bucket of
leaves every day and bring them back to our
cubicle and we still had wood for a
fire and we put water in them and boil them up
a little bit. We didn't eat them
green. We'd boil them up and then put some salt
and pepper on. That was, that
fill our stomachs that's the main thing was to
fill your stomach but every day
and I just say I got down to £105 in the last
day. How did your wife fare?
She was, let's see, she was born in 1920 and I
was born in 1912. She was eight
years younger than me and the younger were the
better off you could be without
protein. Protein is the one thing you need in
your food supply and everybody
had Beriberi, your elbows would swell up and
the worst ones that didn't have the
supplementary food that I had, their whole legs
would turn into a tube this
big all the way down to the foot full of edema
and they could barely
walk they had two canes I got I had beriberi in
my elbows and a little bit
in my knees and for a time I couldn't feel the
ground at all had no sense in
the bottom of my feet but that's just a form
but this business of Beriberi is if
you got some vitamins it would go away if you
got we could take we divided a
can of corned beef and I my wife would have a
spoonful a heaping teaspoon I'd
have a heaping teaspoon for lunch and in one
hour my elbows would shrink to
normal oh is that right that fast the protein
going and through your blood in
one hour would shrink that very very right down
fantastic so I know protein
it's the thing. And so... Did you spend the
rest of your internment there? In Los
Panos. Yes. So then we better get to the rescue
because... Yeah, so we were
getting thinner and thinner and starving. All
you thought about was food. Nothing
else in your mind but get something to eat. Did
you have to do some work?
you had to do some nothing heavy work and I
think well I I made the soap for
this Los Banos camp oh oh yeah I were I had to
go up and get a wheelbarrow full
of ashes wood ashes from the kitchen bring it
down I constructed a soap
factory of Kawas, these are K-A-W-A, Kawa. A
cast iron bowl this big and this deep
all rounded at the bottom. Oh yeah, it was a
three foot diameter, big cast iron one.
It was for a kitchen. That's all we had up
there in a kitchen. We didn't have
those aluminum pots it was, those were down in
San Tomas, and so I would, I set
up a cava for rendering, we had meat scraps,
they would bring in
struggling pieces of meat that they couldn't
use, and our butchers would
trim the fat off and just to give us enough
protein and then they I would get
another bucket of meat scraps and put that in
another cow with a fire under
and render it rendered then then we tried to
make we tried to I take the
ashes and I made an elutriator. I would pour
water through sections of garbage
cans and leach, I leach the water, leach the
lye out of the wood ashes. Then we
would take and we'd heat up, heat up this lye
and we'd dip a little bit of tallow
in there and nothing would happen. And we had
the chief chemist of our company
with me in Los Banos. He couldn't solve it and
he snuck up and back of a, we
call them a bamboo, an American who married a
Filipino wife and found that
that he would, what he did was heat up in his
little saucepan tallow or oil, get
that at 300 degrees and then four spoonfuls of
lye and on top of the
tallow and that would immediately foam and it's
called catching. It would
immediately combine with the fat and make soap.
You had to have the tallow at
300 for the lye to catch on to make soap. So we
switched hands and
then we made soap for the hospital for six
months that way. Well, that was your
work. That was my job for the camp. Yeah. And
they thought that was great. It was
the only soap the hospital had. What happens
now, we're getting down to the
point where MacArthur has come back. Yeah. And
the Japanese are not very happy
about this. No, no, they're mad. How did that
affect you? Well, they didn't get so
mad that you just turn around and shoot you
because here's an American I might
as well shoot him and they got to where they
knew they were gonna die. They
couldn't get back to Japan and we saw troops
coming, well it came, some of them
came into our camp and they were starving and
they said here we don't
have any food can you give us the food we said
sure here's some food get some
rice out of your warehouse here and we'll cook
it all up and you can have
all the rice you want if you get it from your
warehouse that kind of stuff but
well MacArthur came in into Lady and then his
troops came on up and landed
in Batangas, the south coast of Batangas, just
over this volcano from us and moved
in and crowded the Japs. They all kept crowding
in to Manila. They didn't go
into Bataan because they knew that was a death
hole right there, but Manila
they thought they could do something. At least
they had this walled city to
defend and so when they they passed us by we
heard it heard the gunfire over 15
miles this way and then they went into Manila
and there was a tremendous
firefight in Manila took took a week to conquer
the city. We're very well
documented. Yeah all right and and then our
guards our captain of the guards
left the camp with all the guards. We were
under our own control, but he said,
I recommend you don't leave the camp because we
have soldiers all over this
place and 30,000 are right across this volcano,
and if they see an American
they'll just shoot him. I mean, no talk. Did
the guards tell you that? No, the captain of the
guards told our super, our head man, don't
leave the camp. So he was trying to be
helpful. He was trying to be helpful. He didn't
want everybody in, not knowing
that they were going to be shot immediately. He
was trying to be helpful.
So he was the commandant. The captain of the
guards was a vicious guy. He would
never do anything to help us. He killed, I saw
him kill one of my friends coming
threw the fence back into camp with some
coconuts on their shoulder. But so
anyway they they left in trucks. They were gone
five days and we ran the camp.
We went in and stole all the rice that the Japs
had in their warehouse. Passed
it all around among the people and we all had a
good meal of rice. We didn't
overeat and we waited we thought the Americans
said we knew they'd passed us
and taken Manila and and we had Filipinos then
coming into the gate
because they could come to the gate and tell us
what's going on Manila is taken
this and this is going on the Americans are
only 20 miles up the road here yeah
in Montalupa. So where are they? Yeah, where
are they? We're still under our own arrest.
Yeah. And then a Filipino would come into camp
and I saw him in the toilet
room and he arranged with our commandant, our
man, what to do when they were
going to rescue us from behind the Jap lines.
And they brought these DC-3s
in and jumped about 250 paratroopers and they
jumped off the camp not into it
and we had another 250 Filipino guerrillas
around the other side of the
camp and they pinned down whatever guards were
out there at the station
ticket station and the Americans came up the road
The guerrillas were firing on the Filipinos, on
the Japs. The Americans broke through
the gate and they had, there were still about
50 Japs in two barracks right next
to our barrack, and we were down under a mound
of dirt that our barracks was up
high. And there's a lot of bullets just going
all over the place, American
bullets and Jap bullets going all over, big
firefight. We have at that time, well
first Lois and I were lying in this ditch and
this Jap soldier came by with
all camouflaged on him and a rifle and we just
looked at each other and nobody
cracked a smile or anything and he went on in
and crawled over and crawled into
the Jap barracks and he was killed there ten
minutes later but he didn't shoot us.
Yeah. That's amazing, that amazed us. Actually
these were, these were guard
troops, these were not front line troops, these
were older men and crippled or
something, this guy wasn't crippled. No, but
they were not. They were not
front line trained, front line troops. They
just shot us from here. Anyway, we got to
are we had a two-person dugout with log top
dirt on it and we could listen to
all these bullets going over and we could see
these p-38 circling and
finally finally the firing all quieted down to
nothing and they had killed all
the Jap guards at the camp except 20 that had
snuck out under the bridge that
the Americans walked over they were sitting
under this bridge and the
Americans just, they weren't thinking that any
Japs were hiding under the
bridge, they just kept walking across, killed
all the guards in the camp, and
then these 20 ran off and they got to Manila.
Somehow, I've forgotten how they
got to Manila, but because, anyway, that's
terrible. But then the paratroopers came in and we
thought they had taken it for keeps. I mean,
here's the whole army hopping on
the camp and we brought out our last can of
corned beef and started to offer that
to this American who was packed full of food.
He looked at us like crazy, oh no
you have it, you know, we know you're hungry,
you have it. That was a funny joke.
Anyway, he said you get your suitcases, two
suitcases, one each full of your
clothes that you want to take back to the
States, whatever, a little in two
suitcases, one suitcase each, and any, don't
bring any food, you don't have any food
anyway, just bring your suitcases and whatever
else you can put in
these two suitcases, and we, and then he said
we're burning this camp,
We're burning it." We looked up and there it's
already on fire about 200 yards
away from us. It's already burning. And so we
grabbed our suitcases and we walked to
the gate, which is 200 yards away, 300. And we
were carrying, each of us carrying a
suitcase. And this two Filipinas came up and said,
page there, we'll take your suitcases, and they
put a pole through them and
carried them two miles to the beach of Laguna
Dubai, Laguna Dubai,
it's a well-known, big lake, freshwater lake,
and they, I gave them some kind of a
business card I had still I said look it up
they might pay you I can't pay you I
have no money so we went down to the beach and
there was a we piled our
suitcases in a big heap we sat there and then
the troops started firing mortar
shells right from next to us over to keep the
Japs from taking from coming
and shooting these prisoners on the beach
because the Japs, we were rescued
from behind the Jap lines and they, these
mortars kept them off and then we
escaped in Amtrak's, amphibious vehicles, Water
Buffaloes is another name,
made by Food Machinery Company, and they had
already made one trip with all the
nuns and nurses and disabled people back
through the lake only about a mile
offshore the lake is eight ten miles wide
offshore and back into the American
lines at Binyan, B-I-N-A-N with a, what's the
system, what's it on top, a Dipthong,
oh yeah, that's Binyan, and they'd made one
trip and these things only did about
six miles an hour in the water just chugging
along and then they had to come
back so we didn't, we sat out in the hot sun
for six or eight hours because the
camp fight was at 730 in the morning. Yeah. And
they never did get back to us.
You remember what day, what day of the month
was it? Day of the month. It was the month of
the year. I know the month of the year, but I
mean what was the month? Yeah, I uh.
No, no, you see, they took Santa Tomas, well,
as I say, it took the half-tracks half a day
to get back and pick us up.
You could put that, I think I could put that up.
And then we got on to one half-track and we
left our luggage on the shore and they said,
Well, if there's an empty half-track in this group,
and there were some up at the camp,
if there's an empty half-track,
we will put your luggage on it
and take it back to Bignon.
And so we just couldn't care less.
Give us some food to get out of here, get the luggage.
And so we chugged along and I had almost a sunstroke
because I never should have, I had no hat on.
And the sun was right straight overhead.
And the Amtrak is wide open.
You're just standing, standing up in the Amtrak.
There are no seats, no benches or anything.
But you stood in the Amtrak talking like man,
well, slightly.
The Amtrak is such that it's only got
a quarter of an inch shell on it.
And even at 36, we'll go through it.
through it, 50, he'll just go right through the
dam track. His friend of mine had a
baby while in camp and he was, the baby had
slipped down, he was reaching down to
pick it up and the bullet went right over his
back, a jab bullet. Can you imagine that? Yeah,
just luck, luck, luck, luck, everything. Well,
when they got to Biñan, they picked us up
with trucks, took us right up to the national
prison of the Philippines,
Montenlupa, and they said, well, if the luggage
hadn't arrived yet, if the
luggage arrives we'll deliver it to you. It did
arrive. The last Amtrak out was
filled with luggage, and so we ended up with
all the luggage that we tried to, and
then they assigned us a dormitory style in this
civilian prison of the
Philippines on two-layer boards. All the boards
were at three high, three high
bunks, and they were just hardwood boards
spaced about like that, three high, for
the Filipinos, Filipino prisoners, bare boards.
That's no point of, well, I can't use the word.
So anyway, Lois was down in one section of the
prison and I was in another
their second but soon as we got up we all lined
up for the breakfast and it
was scrambled eggs and people just loved it oh
and this is dried eggs of course
and they we just loved a real breakfast and
they'd had an experience in San
Tomas that they everybody got sick because the
army overfed them they fed
them whatever they wanted, but the doctors came
in after the tankers came in and said
hey cut it down, you just can give these
people, their whole system is shrunken and so anyway
they gave us just a little and then these 11th
Airborne who rescued us, more than half
of them were fighting on land. Probably
three-quarters of them fought on land.
They'd been fighting on land for a month. Well,
that's what Airborne did. Yeah.
They got there in an airplane, but they ended
up spending the rest of their life on the ground.
Well, yeah, as you say, they only-this man,
this lieutenant that became our
friend, we spent six weeks in Montalupa because
our rescue ship had been damaged
by a Navy pilot making a loop over the fantail
back in the Admiralty's and it
had to be repaired to bring 6,000 civilians out
of the Philippines. So when
was this? When did we get out? We got out about
April 8th. Roosevelt died. On the 12th.
Yeah, we we went to Manila I think on the 8th
and we got on the Admiral
Eberle, that's the rescue ship run by the Coast
Guard, and it had to go around and
through and get to Tacloban in Leyte. They had
to have to get to Tacloban for
X reasons. You don't know why? No, I don't know
why. I have no idea why, but we had
to stop at Tacloban. Maybe it was to pick up an
escort, but it turned out maybe we
had an escort I think you must have well you're
talking about the war was still
on yeah this was April 8th I think we just
invaded I think Roosevelt died on
the 12th we were at anchor in Tacloban when the
speakers came over and said
President Roosevelt has just died on the 12th
of April so that's a cold figure
you furnished the day 13th when you were there
yeah yeah yeah we had just landed
on Okinawa, the first of that month, so you see
we were very much still in the war.
Oh, yeah.
Very heavy duty.
Yeah, we were rescued early.
So you probably were waiting for escort.
That would make a lot of sense.
Well, but that, we were so occupied.
I understand that.
That's what you mean.
want to cut off your escort because the first
time I looked back and walked
around the deck of the thing and this was
probably three or four days out of
Tacloban, there is no escort. We were running
without it. Oh, excuse me. No, I'm
sorry. We did have a DE. I would think so. We
had one DE escorting us and he was
supposed to escort us to Pearl Harbor. And this
is why it was cut. But we got
out past the Carolines and we had pretty much
cleared up all the submarines.
They knew that far out and but then I think the
DE blew a cylinder on his
diesel engine and so he had to drop back and
get his engine repaired. So we were
without, they told us that, we were without an
escort from the Carolines to
Pearl. But that was a fairly safe area. Yeah,
we couldn't care less. There was nothing safe
around it around the Philippines. No, no. Okay,
now what I'd like to do is, you're safe at the
Philippines, I mean at Pearl, how long were you
at Pearl? Oh, we just pulled into the
Harbor and they sent along they sent a squad of
FBI men and those kind of
people and and they had some names since we
were 6,000 people on this one ship
yeah there were all kinds of people on it and
they had names of people that
they wanted to pull off and interrogate and
maybe arrest. Were there quite a few
of those? No, I never saw one arrestee go off
of the gangplank. I never saw one. So you
didn't stay there very long? Oh, just 12 hours
in the harbor and off we went to
Long Beach. Long Beach. Went to Long Beach. You
and your wife? My wife and I and we
had Jimmy Greer's dance band on board boat and
we danced. We danced on the top
deck of the boat. Yeah. Captain and all that.
When you, when did you get home? And
where was home? My home was in Cincinnati.
That's right. Okay, now I'd like to ask you
something here about your being a civilian and
that you were there with your
company. Yes. What was the, what was the
situation as far as your company was
concerned? You had a lot of back pay coming, I
would think. Oh, well, yeah. Went
the finances? Yeah, well I had all the back pay
of the time from my last
paycheck in Manila until until some date after
I was after I arrived in
Cincinnati. Now they handed me money in Long
Beach. The head man of our whole
West Coast came down to meet us and he he put
us up at the Biltmore Hotel Los
Angeles yeah he gave us money to go and have a
banquet and all that kind of
stuff a marvelous guy but the company oh then
when I got home I had to meet well
I do want to say one thing we took the train
back from Long Beach through New
Orleans. This was SOPAC. Well, we couldn't fly,
couldn't get on a plane. No. The war
is on. We took the SOPAC to New Orleans and up.
Southern Pacific. Yeah, Southern Pacific, up
into Cincinnati and then as we landed at the
Cincinnati terminal, Lois and I
I walked off. I don't know how we got our
luggage off, but that was beside the point.
We still had our luggage. We were wearing the
identical clothes that we had left the
terminal with four years before. The identical
suit and her identical dress. It was part
of her wedding. See, we spent our first four
wedding anniversaries in prison.
She was 21 years old, birthday in July of 41.
She spent three birthdays in prison, in JAP prison.
Well, I will have to say the last prison was
under American control.
We were in an American prison.
Yeah, but it was still a prison, wasn't it? Yeah.
I'm going back to your company now. Yeah.
The money.
Well, you said they paid you on your back pay.
Yeah, I took them, you know, to get the paperwork.
I took them a month.
In the meantime, they would give me whatever
money I had for it.
I'm sure.
What I'm driving at here is you are a civilian POW,
worked for a company very hard, very diligently
and so forth.
Now, was the treatment what you expected?
Obviously, you stayed with them for a long time. Yeah.
You felt the treatment but I expected. Yes, I
had no, I'm not a pusher and I just
kept assuming. They had treated me very well. I
had made three inventions for the
company in the first few years I was with the
company. One of them made
millions of dollars for the company, but they
didn't give me any real boost in
salary for that invention. Well, no, that's
typical. That's typical, yeah. You signed
that off before you went to work? I just forgot
it. Well, you signed it off before you went to work.
Anything... Well, let me say this, they didn't
even give me a boost in position. No. Which is also...
It kind of bugs me today. Not all but notes
that you're not alone. I know, I know.
I want to find out here if I can, did they give
you any, when you got back from
from being a POW, any special thing that they
did for you that you can remember?
I mean, did they throw a party?
No, no, no, no, they didn't.
We didn't want them to throw a party, but we
didn't want them to throw a party for us.
No, they, I mean, they welcomed us and I went
down and talked with the president, the P&G,
and five other guys, and they received us on
the top floor of the Proctor & Gamble Company,
I'd known some of those people before for some
reasons or other.
Were they, there were no bonuses?
No, no bonuses, and we had one bit of
disappointed in this Prisoner of War Claims Act
that the U.S. government made.
We turned in a sheet saying what we had lost to
the Japanese.
clothing and a car. We rented the house, so
that wasn't us, but I think they sent
us a check for $700 for what we'd lost. We'd
lost all our good.
We didn't have furniture. We rented the house.
But the company didn't... No, they
never gave a bonus for being in prison. They
never gave a bonus for that. No.
No, that's the answer there.
Did all of you survive, apparently you did,
from the company?
Yes, all of us in the company survived.
Now we had one man, Bill Burke, who had been
with the company before Procter & Gamble bought it.
I got you.
his uncle owned a third of the company and he
was a wealthy man for the stock.
He got PMG stock for PMC stock. But anyway, no,
but they they they took it
easy on me for a month. Well, I didn't have to
work for a month.
And they paid you? Oh, sure. Oh, everything on
pay, all on pay. But they said,
look John when you think that you can come back
and go back to work tell me
about it. So that was good. Yeah oh they
treated me very well like that. Well you
know I had no doubt that they would. Yeah well
it's a marvelous company. Is there
anything else on this? That I shouldn't think
of. Of course you'll have an opportunity. Can
you punch a button off there and wrap it up.
John, thank you very much. It's an incredible
story and I want to
thank you on behalf of the Nimitz Museum and
staff for putting this on tape.
I'm sure that the scholars of the future are
going to be very interested in
having it and getting to know you through it.
So again we do thank you very
very much I'd be very happy for them to get get
a kick out of it no that's a
very good story thank you very much