<Begin Segment 20>

TI: So, so there were some guards that you really disliked, and again, the question I was trying to ask is, did that color or influence how you viewed Japanese Americans after the war?

BB: No, I did something that was against their thinking. First thing they knew, I was a first sergeant, so, and the first sergeant, you take all the punishment that's delegated to anybody that's done something wrong. So I, I got a lot of beatings. This particular guard, when we first went into -- I'll have to get at the beginning -- we got off the Japanese ship, they put us in a railroad yard, a holding area. And I didn't have anything. I'm standing there, and apparently, standing up, everybody else laying down or sitting or kneeling or whatnot, I looked pretty tall. So an interpreter and a Japanese soldier came over and they said, "You," and they pointed to me, and this interpreter spoke pretty good English, he says, "You will pick up that bag." It was a Gladstone bag. Do you know what a Gladstone bag is? It's a big bag about, it's a travel bag, and it's about this wide, so high. Gladstone is the travel bag for going on long trips, this is made out of elk hide, they wanted the bag. So they made me carry it up to the prison gallery. I didn't know how far it was, going uphill. About a mile, about a half a mile. Another fellow walking alongside by the name of Whitney says, "I'll help you carry it for halvers," so I said, "Okay, whatever's in it is half yours." We got out of prison camp and there's a big yard, bigger than this house, twice as, three or four times bigger than this house, yard. It's the gathering yard where they count the prisoners and the recreation area, where they can loaf and whatnot. Any rate, why, everybody has to open everything up and show what they've got.

So I open this bag up, well, there's a, this camp has English, Dutch, black Dutch, white Dutch, one Canadian, one Aussie, and then the fifty Americans who just came in. One of the Englishmen comes in, a sergeant by the name of Marshall. Marshall's occupation is in, in Britain, he was a professional thief. So he comes in and he says, "You're not getting away with this stuff, the guards are going to take everything. Let me go through your bag and take whatever you want and I want, and we'll split it." "Okay." So he gets a bunch of stuff, fills his pockets inside his shirt and goes back inside the barracks. The guards come over, and boy, they raided everything. It had white T-shirts, that's the first thing that went. Had white towels, they went. It had underwear, that went. And then they had all kinds of shaving gear, and so this belonged to a fellow that had been in China. I still have his address book. And it was a marine in at Tiensen, and he had his own, had a Harris tweed suit, but no, no coat, had the pants and vest, had lots of underwear. So I ended up with quite a bit, quite a few pieces of underwear, which I gave to different, other Americans, too.

And so we know the Japanese want this bag, well, I don't have, I've got a canteen but no carrier, and I didn't have a belt. So I took it, we had a carpenter in the camp, an Englishman, he says, "Well, what do you want me to do with the bag?" I said, "Cut it up, make me a belt and a canteen carrier, here's my canteen. Fix it so that I can use it, carry it." "Okay." He says, "If I cut it up, you're going to get an awful beating from the Japanese." I said, "I don't care. I want this. Cut it up." Well, the guards found out that I had it cut up, I got outside and got, oh, they beat the hell out of me for about two or three hours and they let me go. Well, Peg-leg was one of those. He wanted that bag in the worst way. So every excuse he had, on work detail when I come in, I got a beating. And in fact, some of 'em were so severe that it got registered by all the fellows when they were freed, and they made affidavits about this beating. And so I'm in the, in the English army, they made a deposition on it, the guys in the American army all made depositions on it, the guy from Canada made a deposition on it, and I have a record of it. I didn't know why I'd been selected to go to war crimes, and this was the reason, this one beating. They had proof of how bad I'd been treated. So any rate, see, they had something against me. I had, they wanted this bag in the worst way, I had it all cut up, it became patches for shoes, lot of guys didn't have, they had worn-out shoes, particularly the British army, and so that became insole or outside patch for the shoes, shoe leather.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.