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was just three and a half miles long and a mile and a half wide. A great deal of it didn't have any
guns on it. The big guns were on the big end of the islands, and antiaircraft scattered all over,
and where you see little x's, that's where my gun position was. The three inch and aircraft, and
we fought the bombers that come to bomb the island. Whenever they pulled all those guns in on
us, until then the bombings, for about five months, had killed approximately 125 men. That
seems odd, doesn't it? But we were well protected. The big guns on the other end of the island
had concrete areas they could go down and under. Over in the channel was another fort. It was a
concrete fort called Fort Drum. It had fourteen inch Navy rifles that could reach out 18 miles.
We had big guns on the island there to fight the Navy with if the Navy ever came in, but they
never did come in, that would reach 33 miles-twelve inch rifles. They never had the
opportunity to use them, because the Japanese chose not to come in and battle our artillery on the
island. They could starve us more easily and less costly than they could come in and try to fight
us out. The big prize was Manila, one of the greatest seaports in the Far East, and still is. Then
we had a Navy yard over there called Damiti (sic) and they wanted that. We were in the mouth
of the bay keeping them out. We were doing two things-we were holding them back, letting
America get prepared and giving America more time to go to war (we were not really ready for
war when it happened). It's a long story, and I don't know all of it. The other thing was the
Japanese had gotten a great deal of our fleet at Pearl Harbor, and at Pearl Harbor they knew they
hadn't gotten our aircraft carriers, and that's what they were afraid of. The Americans always
had the reputation of taking care of their own. There was over 33,000 of us out there. The
Japanese could see us loading up ships, planes, etc. coming to relieve and resupply us, so they
had fixed their navy in such a position that if we tried that they would envelope our total Navy
and destroy all of it, and then America would have been left totally without defense on the West
Coast. They could have come in and done anything they wanted to.
So much for that. See the picture where they were beating on the three men? That is the first
execution after we were put into camps. That's Cabanatuan Camp 3. That's the next day after
they counted all of us into Cabanatuan 1. These three men, I think, had tried to escape and
decided they couldn't make it, and they came in the next day with their hands up down the road.
The Japanese looked up the road and saw them, run out and got them, tied them up, and started
beating on them. The third morning, the men asked to be executed. They couldn't stand it any
longer. You can stand just so much pain, and it's best to go ahead and get rid of it by being
executed. That isn't the only execution that they had. I have some white scars all across my
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