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BB: Well, in -- I'll tell you a funny story. In this, in this hospital area, I became... I was appointed the sergeant of the guard. We had a detail in this, in the inside of a prison camp to prevent guys from escaping because the Japanese had what they called "ten squads." If anyone escaped, the other nine would be killed, and they did it. They didn't hesitate, they did it. They proved it two or three times at Cabanatuan. And so I was on the guard detail, it was, and I had a whole bunch of guys assigned to me, about ten, and we patrolled the inner fence. Now, there were, prison camp had two fences. It had one with barbed wire and another one that had just plain wire, and the barbed wire was further apart, you could actually get out thorough it, once you got through the smaller fence area, you could get out. And fellows did escape, and they got caught and they would be either beheaded or shot or whatever.

TI: And when they got caught, did they kill the other nine, too?

BB: I was, I was on two ten squads, and both times, they, the fellow, they captured him and beheaded him, and the last time I thought I was going to get it. I was, we were put in, we had a prison within a prison, and I was in the jail and so I had my last meal and so one of the officers, Captain Terry, officer of the guard, asked me what I wanted my last meal. I said, "You know, I love banana cream pie. Do you suppose I could get bananas and some cream or something?" The officers figured out and they got, they made me a little tiny pie about that big around on a rice cake, put bananas in it, and then they had canned, they had condensed cream, condensed milk, and they put this condensed milk on the top. They brought it to me about ten o'clock or so, and I thought, "Well, this is my last meal," and I ate it. At about ten minutes to twelve, a guard came round and said, "Let him out. He's sergeant of the guard again, let him out." The first question the officer asked me, "What did you do with that banana cream pie?" I said, "I ate it." "Why did you eat it? You were forgiven." I said, "Well, I ate it before then."

TI: Wow. In terms of treatment in the camps versus the march, how would you characterize the, the difference?

BB: A lot depended on where you were and what you did. Now, the, in Cabanatuan, they established a farm, and they had a group that went out on the farm detail every day. Now, they were supposed to weed, they were supposed to plant, we planted, whatever they told us to plant, we planted 'em, and most of the time it was, they were planting sugar, sugar beets. Yeah, sugar beets. The sugar, there were sugar potatoes, sweet potatoes. I was trying to think of the, the translation. Any rate, I ended up working on a farm several times, and one time, I and another fellow, we decided we're gonna scoff some of this stuff and bring it in a cabin and have it for dinner. So each one of us took a few leaves of these sweet potato vines and put 'em in our pockets. One of the guards saw us put it in our pocket, so when we were lined up ready to go into the prison camp from the farm, he had this fellow and I slap each other. And the fellow that, was Joe Errington, the biggest guy in the tank company, the most muscular, and he and I had a slapping contest. Each time the guard, whose nickname was... his name was Ohara, but we called him "Air Raid," and he insisted we hit each other harder. So finally Joe knocked me out, well, then he was satisfied. Knocked me out, and they carried it back into camp. But they all carried bamboo poles, and if you were not working fast enough or doing, or taking too much time eating or something, you got this bamboo... most of the time they hit you over the head.

TI: So how long did this continue? I mean, what, how long were you in this camp?

BB: I was in Cabanatuan, I guess about a year and a half, in that prison camp, and then I went on a detail to Las Pinas to level off an area that they built, an airfield, to teach young Japanese how to fly, which turned out to be a mud bog, and every time they would land, why, the wheels would stick in the mud and they'd lose the plane. So they'd make all these recruits carry the plane back and repair it, and each one of the, they got the same treatment we did, they, they got beat up, usually. That was the custom of the old Japanese army, that corporal could beat the private or the recruit up, and the sergeant could beat the corporal up and the officer would beat the sergeant up, and then a captain would beat the lieutenant up. That was, that was the way they ran their army.

TI: Food; what, what did you eat while you were in these camps?

BB: Food? Rice or... in Japan, in Japan we ate a lot of wheat. Remember they had Manchuria, which is wheat-growing area, and so what the prisoners ate was wheat instead of rice, or we had rice that had been discarded. Wasn't the right kind of rice, because it wasn't white. Japanese people love white rice in Japan proper. And if it wasn't the right kind of rice, we got it. And then the soup was usually, in the Philippines, it was mostly greens off of the, when they harvest the sweet potatoes, their greens were given to the POWs, they made soup out of it. Or we had cariboa soup. They had, they would actually allow the butcher a cariboa or two a day. Now, imagine, a prison camp has three to five thousand prisoners in it, so one cariboa is not very much meat. You get about the size of a spoonful of meat, if that much, in your, in your rations, that was it. And that only happened about once a week, if that.

TI: So I imagine your weight just dropped and dropped and dropped.

BB: Oh, yeah. I went down, I weighed 175 when I went in, went to Bataan, and I ended up weighing about 105, 110. When the war ended, our camp was fed for a month by the military. They dropped food to us, and we stayed in the, nobody came to rescue us, we never saw an American soldier, so the Japanese captain finally got tired of us and put us on a train, went to Nagasaki. Nagasaki, why, there were a lot of ships in the port there in Nagasaki, and I went on the aircraft carrier, the Chenango.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.