My Hitch in Hell

by Lester I. Tenney

  Tanks and men of the 192d Tank Battalion on maneuvers in Louisiana in September 1941. The unit performed so well that it was selected to go overseas immediately. Author’s collection

  The author (second from left) and fellow crew members in the Philippines in mid-December 1941. Author’s collection

  A Japanese attempt at psychological warfare during the battle for Bataan. National Archives

  On April 10, 1942, Japanese soldiers entered the author’s bivouac area, captured an American soldier, and walked him to the main road. Thus began the Bataan Death March. National Archives

  Prisoners rest on the first day of the march. National Archives

  Some had to march for days with their hands tied behind their backs. National Archives

  Prisoners were made to raise their hands for this Japanese propaganda photograph. National Archives

  The Japanese forced Filipino civilians to view murdered troops. National Archives

  Burial detail at Camp O’Donnell. National Archives

  A Japanese soldier enjoys a drink from a GFs canteen. National Archives

  The POW barracks at Camp 17, located near the town of Omuta on the island of Kyushu and about thirty-five miles east of Nagasaki.

  Japanese workers building a retaining wall in Camp 17’s dangerous coal mine. Each eight-man team of Allied prisoners was headed by two Japanese civilian supervisors, many of whom were as brutal as the Japanese soldiers. Author’s collection

  A Camp 17 coal mine tunnel about to collapse. National Archives

  Crematorium used to dispose of prisoners’ bodies at Camp 17. National Archives

  A misleading but prudent postcard sent by the author from Camp 17 to his father.

  The author (center) back in the Philippines in September 1945 with fellow members of Company B, 192d Tank Battalion. The hilt of a souvenir samurai sword is just visible on author’s left side. Author’s collection

  The author (left) and his friend Lew Brittan, two of the sixteen survivors of Company B, in a Chicago nightclub after the war. Author’s collection

  Forty-three years after the battle for the Philippines, Senator Barry Goldwater presents the author with the Bronze Star for gallantry in action. Ahwatukee (Ariz.) News

  The first group of prisoners at the original Camp Cabanatuan came in around May 26, 1942. By May 30, six thousand men had arrived in camp, all Corregidor defenders. This camp was referred to as Camp Number 3. The men from O’Donnell were sent to Camp Number 1, about five miles away. The subsequent death rates for each camp illustrate the drastic differences between the two camps. From the opening of Camp Number 3 to October 29, when both camps merged, sixty-nine men died in that camp. During the same period, twenty-one hundred men died in Camp Number 1. The morale at Camp Number 1 plummeted. Seeing death all around us made us tremble with constant anxiety regarding our own mortality. The small rice supply coupled with the alarmingly high death rate played havoc with the men’s desire to live.

  Given the men’s overall condition, the officers who arrived from Corregidor were healthier and appeared more capable of taking charge of the camp. Obviously, a healthy officer would command much more respect from both the American prisoners and the Japanese soldiers than would an officer who was sick and disabled, regardless of his rank. Thus, when our small group from the Bataan work detail arrived in this new camp, we found the healthy ones assuming control. While we could expect this, we still found it hard having someone who had never been beaten telling us how to handle ourselves if we were ever put into the unfortunate position of being punished by the Japanese.

  At the time of the surrender the medics from Corregidor took large quantities of medical supplies with them. We prisoners still wonder whether all of these medicines and supplies were turned over to the doctors at the camp hospital when the Corregidor contingent entered Camp Cabanatuan. Neither the men suffering from malaria nor those suffering from dysentery could obtain any medicine available to help them. We will never know whether men died because of selfishness or discrimination as to who would receive necessary medication. A few of the medics sold or bartered the medicine in their possession to the highest bidder, leaving those without resources no relief. At times word went out that if a prisoner had money he could buy certain types of medicine, such as sulfa or quinine. If those men who sold medicine lived to come home, they have had to live with the knowledge that they played the role of God for money. May God help them overcome their transgression.

  As time wore on the lack of shoes and clothing also became a serious problem. Without a shirt or pair of pants, a man’s body temperature would soar from the extreme heat. And without shoes or other foot protection, men commonly suffered from blisters, cuts, and infections. The Japanese never issued clothing to us POWs. Instead, we took clothes from those who died and buried them nude so that their clothes could be washed and then given to those men with the greatest need. In those cases where men no longer had shoes to protect their feet, they went barefoot until they found a pair of shoes their size among the remnants of the dead.

  Before long we learned that the Japanese wanted men with technical experience for the better jobs in camp or for the better details out of camp. So many a truck driver turned engineer overnight. Those without special technical skills, or who were not smart enough to fake it, were made laborers and were given the dirtiest as well as the hardest jobs in and outside of camp. The one job that almost every man was assigned to at some time or other, however, was to labor on the camp farm.

  At Cabanatuan, everyone had a chance to learn farming the hard way. We had to do everything by hand, for we did not have any machines to help in the digging or harvesting, and we put in long hours to accomplish the tasks required by the Japanese. Work started at 6:00 in the morning and lasted till about 11:00, when we were given a bowl of rice and a cup of colored water called soup for lunch. We could rest until 2:00 in the afternoon, and then we worked on the farm till dark. This routine went on day after day, without a break, and we were not allowed to talk while in the field, planting, picking, or digging. We thought that the food was for us, we were so foolish. The Japanese either ate the food or traded what we grew for favors in town from the local Filipinos. The farm produced large quantities of beans, squash, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, and eggplant. As a rule, we POWs got the tops, while the Japanese ate the vegetables. And of course if anyone were caught eating any of the vegetables while working on the farm, a beating was the price he paid.

  The men doing farm detail had nicknames for many of the guards watching over them. American soldiers anywhere assigned nicknames based on facial expressions, verbal characteristics, actions, or just about anything else that could connote a guard’s personality. “Big Speedo” was so named because no matter how hard the men worked on the farm, he would yell out, “Speedo, speedo,” meaning of course, to work faster. Every time the guard named “Donald Duck” spoke or hollered at us, he would speak so fast in Japanese that he sounded just like the cartoon character. Almost without exception, the nicknames chosen were names that everyone understood and were able to relate to the correct individual.

  My first day on the farm started at 6:00 in the morning. The temperature had already reached ninety-six degrees and was expected once again to reach the mid-hundreds by the afternoon. I no sooner walked onto the farm area, when wham, one of the guards hit me with a shovel right in the small of my back. I had stepped on a plant that was just starting to grow, and this was my first punishment of the day. Within two hours I received two more whacks on the head with bamboo sticks filled with sand. I just was not working fast enough. Later, when I got down on my knees to pull some weeds, two guards cornered me. One hit me on the neck with the stick end of a shovel, while the other pounded my head and shoulders with his heavy-duty walking stick. I learned another lesson that day: I could not kneel down, but only bend down from the waist. When the whistle finally blew, indicating the end of work for the day, I was bleeding from my back, head, and shoulder
s. Surviving this ordeal was not going to be easy.

  I fell to the ground after the guards left the field, and a few of the other workers helped me up and to the barracks. I was planning on going to the medics for treatment and possibly a “no work” badge for the next day, but my friends told me that some of the Japanese guards who worked the farm hung around the medics’ building just to see who went in. The next day, that person would really get a beating, within an inch of his life. Sometimes the guards did not even leave an inch, and prisoners died right there in the field. That way, their cause of death could be listed as heatstroke.

  Strong evidence suggests that the guards in Cabanatuan were, for the most part, the poorest educated and least respected men in the Japanese army. It appeared that if they had not been guarding prisoners of war, many of these soldiers would have been shipped back to Japan and given jobs guarding bathhouses. Some of the guards did so many stupid things that their superiors often beat and humiliated them in front of us American and Filipino prisoners. These miserable guards would then take their pain out on us, beating us for any infraction of a regulation or minor rule. In fact, in many cases these guards would make up their own rules to justify torturing, beating, and denying food to the “big” Americans. The only difference among the guards was the degree of their sadistic treatment of the prisoners.

  After taking all of this, I knew that getting out of this camp was the only way I was going to survive. Then one night at roll call, five men did not answer when their numbers were called. The guards became frantic, screaming for everyone to sit down in our places on the parade field. They did not make any effort to determine if any of these men were sick or had died; the Japanese just assumed that if they did not answer roll call, they had escaped. For a while we thought that ten of us would be put to death for every escapee; but after about two hours, the guards came back to our area and informed us that they had captured the five men.

  The guards were pleased with themselves, laughing and slapping each other on the back. We were ordered to stand at attention; the commander wanted to talk to us. About ten minutes later, he strolled in with his interpreter. He explained that many of us were saved because the guards did such a good job of locating the escapees. Only the men who attempted to escape would be put to death the following morning.

  Rumors and camp scuttlebutt indicated that four of the five men had, in fact, tried to escape. The guards had found the fifth man hiding under the floor of one of the barracks, so sick he just wanted to die in peace. He had defecated all over himself just hours before and had been burning up from a bad case of malaria.

  As we walked off the field, we saw that their punishment had begun. The guards were beating each man with wooden clubs and kicking him, first in the stomach, then in the middle of his back, and finally in the kidneys—all of this after the man had fallen to the ground. The guards then led the prisoners, with their hands bound behind their backs, to the rear of the parade ground, where they were tied to a post usually reserved for whippings.

  After falling in for roll call the following morning, we all looked toward the rear of the parade ground for the five men. They were tied to the fence just on the other side of the border of our camp so that the Filipinos who walked by could see how the Japanese punished anyone caught trying to escape.

  The five men remained tied to the fence for the next two days. No food or water was brought to them. The only thing they got while standing in the broiling sun all day was more beatings from various guards. Some of the guards kicked them. Others swung their belts in a wide arc and hit the men repeatedly over their faces, arms, and heads with the heavy metal buckles on the end of their belts. Other guards jokingly played the part of executioner, feinting with their bayonets toward the hearts of the tortured men.

  Two of the noncommissioned officers pulled their samurai swords from their scabbards and started to swing them as if practicing to decapitate the men. In fact, with the prisoners unable to stand erect and with their heads bowed because of the intense heat, some of the sword movements came so close to their heads or necks that from a distance it looked as if their heads were in fact separated from their bodies.

  On the third day, ten armed guards marched the five men to the cemetery. The prisoners—weak from starvation these past days, sick with malaria and dysentery, broken in body and spirit—were forced to dig their own graves. When they finished, these brave and proud men spontaneously stood at rigid attention, ready for whatever the Japanese had in store for them.

  After their hands were tied behind their backs, the Japanese commander placed a lit cigarette in each prisoner’s mouth and turned to face the guards, each one with his rifle aimed at one of the five Americans. The commander raised his sword above his head and quickly brought the sword down in a gesture that indicated “Fire.” Four of the five men fell instantly. Within seconds, the guards fired another round, and the last man fell to the ground. The commander walked over to the fallen men, their prostrate bodies still quivering. After removing his revolver from its holster, he put one more bullet into each man’s head. They were now dead, having paid the price of trying to escape. To all of us watching the message was clear: try to escape and death will surely follow.

  Once again, this psychological trauma was getting to be more than I could bear. I kept wondering, if there was a work detail I could volunteer for or whether I could go someplace else that would give me a better chance of surviving this holocaust. My mind raced a mile a minute, trying to figure out how I could avoid becoming a sad statistic of this war.

  As luck would have it, I was called out of line the following morning and told to gather whatever belongings I had; I was being shipped out with 499 other men. All five hundred of us were herded together on the parade ground for a roll call and inspection. We asked ourselves, “What was going to happen? Where were we going? Why the inspection? Why the hurry?” Within minutes, the rumor mill started pumping: the Red Cross was negotiating the release of American prisoners of war. For an exciting few hours, just the thought of being free made us forget our troubles. Soon after the inspection, we were herded onto trucks headed toward Manila. We could feel it in our bones. We were going to board a ship for freedom.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE NIGHTMARE SHIP

  After working on Bataan for three months and then on the Cabanatuan farm for a few weeks, I was ready for any change of guards and environment. Although the rumor mill predicted we were being returned to our forces, we found out soon enough it was indeed just a rumor.

  We did board a Japanese freighter, the Toro Maru, but our destination was not the United States; it was Japan. From the looks of it, the ship was at least thirty years old and aging fast. It needed a paint job just to keep the steel from rusting out, and as far as freighters go, it was small compared to a few of the others docked alongside. The Manila docks were bustling with activity, with dozens of men doing a variety of jobs. Some were loading scrap metal on board our ship; others were loading thousands of sacks of rice.

  The men in our group slowly disembarked from the trucks, and the guards, in sign language, ordered us to form a line, two abreast. Then we had to have a formal count to satisfy the dozen officers on the dock. The leader of the Japanese soldiers, Lt. Tanaka San (“San” stands for the English word mister and is always used after the name), asked who in our group knew how to cook, or was a cook in the U.S. Army. I raised my hand and was chosen, along with three other men, to be a cook aboard the ship. We were told the officers on the dock were there to bid farewell to the first ship leaving for Japan with prisoners aboard. We realized that we were going to be relieving some of the Japanese citizens from certain menial jobs, against the principles of the Geneva Convention, thus freeing them for military service to fight for the emperor.

  It was a very hot day, and the sweat poured off my head and face. My tattered shirt was soaking wet. As we started to board the ship, we saw a contingent of American POWs sitting on the dock and eating their me
ager rice ration. They watched us while we marched aboard and gave us the V sign, along with a farewell wave. In spite of the fact that I wanted to leave Cabanatuan, I really was not excited about going to Japan in this so-called oceangoing ship. Rusty and obviously old, it did not look seaworthy, even to a landlubber like me.

  We walked up the plank onto the ship’s deck, where I was pulled out of line along with the other cooks and led to where the cooking was to be done. To the rear of the main deck we found the “galley”; we could not laugh out loud for fear of insulting the Japanese. What we saw were four very large kettles, which could hold about forty gallons of water each. The one on the left, we were told, was for soup, the two in the middle were for cooking rice, and the one on the right was for tea.

  We were to serve two meals a day: one at 8:00 in the morning, the second at 4:00 in the afternoon. We were to remain down in the hold with the rest of the men from 6:00 in the evening till 6:00 in the morning and then from 11:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon. In other words, we were able to stay topside five hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon. Working out in the fresh air was an advantage, and I was sure that any one of the men would have loved trading places with any one of us cooks.

  The Toro Maru set sail from Manila about September 5, 1942, with its human cargo of slave labor. I was not a good sailor. I was seasick within hours of our ship leaving Manila, but I was able to assist with the cooking that first night out. By morning I was really sick. I made frequent trips to the side of the ship, always with an excuse of throwing something overboard. I did not want any of the guards to see me heaving my guts over the side, or my role as a cook would come to an immediate halt. I must admit I liked the freedom the job carried.