You couldn't -- of course, you couldn't go. There's no going to the bathroom or nothing like that. It was all done right there. So we went from there which was a short trip from Cabanatuan to Manila. Of course it was an all day trip. So when you got to Manila you were feeling pretty rough.

Then we went into Bilibid, which is where they -- all of the guys that were seriously wounded, they couldn't do anything, that's where they were. And we stayed there until the 27th, three days later. Then from there we left, went aboard a cargo vessel prison ship and they had a hole down there that we had 300 in our group and they put all 300 of us in that one hole and we rode that way all the way to Taiwan. It was like the box car, really. There was just no space and if you were the last one to go down, you had no place to sit. They all had to stand up and everybody was just so cramped up you couldn't move. You couldn't go to the bathroom. There was nothing, no way to do it so they'd lower buckets down with water and if you got lucky enough to get some water where you could. So you had the same problem. Your knees drawn under your chin and that's where you sat and that's where you stayed. They kept us down below and they let us come up on topside just once in the morning and once in the afternoon because we didn't know where we were going. We just thought maybe we were just going direct to Japan. I was in kind of like the back corner. Because I got in there maybe about halfway through, I did find a little space and I just sat there. Just draw your knees up and put your head on your knees and put your arms around your legs and that's how you sat. And, of course, you sat there for so long you couldn't hardly -- when you did have a chance to stand up, you'd stand up and then fall over again because of the cramps that you'd have.

But the ships were not marked and, of course, the Americans didn't know what type of cargo they were taking or handling or what, see. They had troops along in that ship right along with us, the regular troops. From Taiwan to Osaka we had an American submarine that fired two torpedoes at us and missed, of course. The ship we went over on was very fortunate because the prison ship before us and after were sunk by the American subs and with a great loss of life. I think one of them had 1500 on and I think maybe less than 500 survived. And we lost all of our officers on one, they bombed that ship and the submarine sunk it and we lost every one of them. We had a Navy fellow that said that we had two torpedoes fired at us after we left Manila harbor. We were on two ships, two prison ships and one of them was loaded with Japanese troops going back to Japan. There was a prison ship and two destroyers and one of the destroyers was sunk and torpedoed as we left the harbor.

So we went back into the harbor and then the next morning we started out again. Made it to Formosa and stayed there for a short -- about not quite a week, but the Americans had just bombed Formosa. The battle of Saipan and Guam was about to happen and when we got in there the harbor was pretty well cleared. So we stayed there too long as far as I'm concerned because all the Americans were doing was waiting for that harbor to fill up again and then they'd come back. So then we made it through and we had stormy weather from there all the way to Japan and which I was thankful for that because I said, no submarine can see us. And this navy guy said, they don't need to see. All they got is sonar. They can just use that and hit you with that.

We left March 24th, went aboard a Japanese prison ship and took us three days to go to Taiwan, which is Formosa. Then we stayed there until April the 2nd and then we sailed for Japan and went to Osaka. We landed in Osaka on April the 8th.

We got off the ship in Osaka and it was snowing, great big old snow flakes. So we went on to Hitachi and they had snow under everything. It was cold. So that was in April of ‘44. So at that time the Japanese issued navy uniforms to everybody. What they did, they paraded us. We left Osaka and put us on a train and went to Tokyo. They put us on display, marched us through Tokyo, said, oh, we sunk another American ship. Here's the proof right here and we've been prisoners for over two years. Just like Lindbergh in New York. Everybody was on the sides, you know, hollering and all this and that. It was a big thing, you know. Then we had to take off our uniforms and go back into our prisoner of war clothes. Of course, shoes, we didn't have shoes. I had to wire the soles together to make them stay on. After a while they gave us their little, they call them aerial tennis shoe. There's no toes except for your big toe and the rest of your toes are just loose, like sandals. And we left Tokyo, went up north to Hitachi which was a copper mine. We got settled down there and went to work in a copper mine.

This particular camp, they had a whole bunch of the Chinese prisoners. They'd been there for years. We couldn't tell in other places where they had prisoners. But where we were, it was just the 300 of us that went into this particular area. The camp commander with the interpreter would always greet you, and say, you know, you're in camp and the Americans are losing the war. And then the interpreter would say that anyone that escaped from this camp would be shot with guns. That was a pet thing that they'd come up with. We got settled down and had like eight people in a little hut. Grass mats, they had those for a bed. And the darn mosquitoes, fleas, and everything, you could just see them hopping all over. In the wintertime there, when it got cold, they'd issue you like maybe 10 or 15 pieces of coke, which is like a coal, and you had a little fire. A little pit in the middle of this thing. You'd fire that up and for about an hour had a little heat. You froze for the rest of the time because Hitachi was real, real cold. That temperature was down below zero. Hitachi was way up north, so it was pretty cold pretty much of the year. Of course, we had no -- not anything heavy, not a heavy blanket of any kind. You had just a little old light blanket. But then you couldn't have the thing over you because the fleas in that mat would just eat you alive. You'd bundle those fleas up like that, you can't sleep at night. Everybody was sick too with diarrhea and you'd be going to the bathroom at least 20 times a night. It was just up and down and try to sleep and then you have to go again. You go to the latrines. They had the latrines set up. You just get by.

And then, one time, they brought in a bunch of bones. They gave them to us and what we do we just broke them and got the marrow out of them and we would eat that. They'd eat the meat off of the bones and give us the bones. That was nutritional in a way, you know.

Within three days, we were down in a copper mine. I worked 1200 and 1500 feet underground and each one had a different job to do. I worked a drill to start with. They give you a six-foot drill and then you'd keep it for a week and you'd go in there and find the vein. Then you drill and they come and blast. The Japanese would come on in and set the charge. Normally when you put the blasting cap on to blow it up, you'd have a little crimping machine. Crimper pliers that you'd crimp the edge so it would stay in the stick of dynamite. He would stick it in his mouth and crimp it with his teeth. So every time he did that, we all ran around the corner, you know, trying to see if his head was going to splatter all over everything.

You'd follow that vein until you ran out of it and then if there's no more behind that, you'd go and they'd find a new one. The Japanese civilians -- we were working with civilians in the copper mining and the soldiers, of course, they didn't come down there. The civilians were in charge over us down there and then they'd meet us as we came up and take us back to camp. You'd start digging and then you dig, dig, dig and first thing you know you've got a great big hole. They never shored anything up and that's one thing we all really feared, the cave-ins. The Chinese, a lot of them were killed by cave-ins and ours seemed to withstand all of it, even the blasting. But you could look up and see that stuff hanging and you just knew somebody else was setting off a charge.

For your noon meal they'd give you like a cigar box with rice in it. And by the time that you got ready to eat it at noon time, well, being down in that humidity down there, it would sour. You know, you tried to eat that stuff and it'd just make you sick. Really wouldn't even be worth eating.

If we could get by with sabotage we would do it. Any time we could sabotage anything we would. They never caught on. They would blast and then we'd have to shovel all that over in a cart and then the main chute would go down to the one that we'd dumped. Then it would go up topside and then they'd haul it off from there. And we'd start pushing that cart down there and really start running with it and it would hit the edge of that thing, tip over, and the cart and everything would fall down in the chute. Well, that would tear it up for the rest of the day because they had to clean it out and all they could say was domy da, domy da (phonetic), which is "no good, no good." You know. But we did that all the time and then we would, on the drilling there was all air compressor and you'd shoot too much pressure to it and break the drills. Just anything that you could do, but they never seemed to catch on. We were having fun as far as that goes because we didn't know if they'd take us topside and shoot all of us. But any time we could do it, we did that.

The civilians didn't bother you. We would do just enough work to get by and they could see that we were slowing down. So they'd give us what they call a camara which is a contract and say if you do so many carts per day, well, then you can quit and go back to camp and rest. Well, we would do it real quick because we could quit at one o'clock. We'd go down about 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning. So then the next day, he'd give you more work to do, see. So then we said, well, we'll slow it down. Working in a copper mine is like working in a coal mine. You get dust and it's getting in your system and I was getting you know, choked up. You just can't breathe hardly and we didn't stay there as long as some of them did. Some of them stayed there until the end of the war and they've got problems today with the copper dust. It's just like coal dust. We're working in the coal mines and a lot of them came up with TB and stuff like that.

We were just lucky. We had no cave-ins and, of course, a lot of guys would bang themselves up. Not getting out of the way of that cart or somebody swinging a pick, you know, not hitting with the pick to penetrate, but they'd knock them down or something. Just minor injuries. But you didn't want to do it too often, you know. They kept that thing going 24 hours a day and it was the old anaconda mines that was in World War I. They were active until 1927, well they reactivated those things and all the shoring that they had in there had all deteriorated and weakened. So it was really a scary thing to go down there and see that what they were doing.   (continue)