Bellevue vet refused to die in POW ordeal: Now war against terrorism
delaying his hope of justice.
2001-09-30
by Mark D. Baker
Journal Reporter
BELLEVUE -- This is a story of survival, of heroism
and triumph and a final quest for justice.
This is Cecil Waldo Parrott's story, the story of a
man who survived as other men dropped dead around him -- during the
Bataan Death March, in the darkness and desperation of the Zero Ward, as
a slave laborer far below ground in Imperial Japan's coal mines.
Maybe it was the friendly Japanese soldier he met
along the way or the daydreams of a future love that kept him going.
Maybe it was the poetry he wrote, reminding him of better days to come,
or the myriad recipes he jotted down on the back of canned food labels
-- recipes concocted after the coal mines had blackened his skin, but
not his heart.
There may be days in a man's life when he thinks it
might be better to be dead than to witness the horror all around him.
Cecil Parrott has lived through such days.
One thousand, two hundred and twenty-eight days.
For more than three years during World War II, Parrott
was imprisoned by the Japanese -- from the time of the 55-mile death
march on Bataan in April 1942 until the end of the war in August 1945.
During the eight-day forced march in the Philippines, he lost 66 pounds.
When he finally made it to Camp O'Donnell, a POW camp on Bataan, he
carried just 97 pounds of skin and bone on his 5-foot-8-inch frame.
Shipped to Japan in September 1944, Parrott spent a year working day and
night in the coal mines of the southern Japanese cities of Omuta and
Fukuoka. He is one of an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 men still living who
worked there -- for nothing. Not a dime.
It was war. As they die off, men
who were imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, those who
suffered unspeakable horrors during the death march, in the POW camps
and coal mines, are going to their graves feeling slighted, says
Parrott, now 81.
While many Americans have embraced a new kind of war
in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, some veterans from an
old war are still fighting.
"I went to Boise, the county seat, and signed up for the Army. And
the reason I chose the Philippines was because my older brother used to
pal around with a guy who was in the service before that. And he'd been
in the Philippines. And he talked as if it was a glorious place to be.''
-- Cecil W. Parrott, on his decision to join the Army in November 1940,
a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
This month is the 50th anniversary of the formal peace
treaty signed in San Francisco between the United States and Japan.
According to Japan and the U.S. State Department, one provision of the
treaty banned claims by Americans used as slave laborers.
Parrott and the men who served alongside him have been
fighting to get compensation for the horrors they lived through. Bills
in Congress seek to pay the men, but now any action has been pushed back
by the focus on the terrorist attacks.
Parrott is also part of a class-action lawsuit filed in California in
1999 and now headed for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking
damages against present-day Japanese corporate behemoths Mitsui and
Mitsubishi, owners of the mining companies Parrott and about 20,000
other POWs worked for during the war.
Ex-POWs such as Parrott want what they say is their fair share. In the
other major theater of World War II, a $5 billion settlement last year
was divided between nearly a million survivors who had worked as slave
laborers for German companies during the war.
A Bellevue resident since 1956, Cecil Parrott is a
gentle soul. He is thoughtful and reflective, and he does not seem
bitter about his experience. He's not some old war bird seeking revenge.
He doesn't talk much about the war, unless you ask. Then,
from behind bespectacled, clear blue eyes, he tells you plenty.
``I think it's due to us, I really do,'' Parrott says. ``We worked as
slaves for the Japanese. I don't know how much money they made back in
that time, but they made money off of us.'' "If
you had a ring that was so tight on your finger, because your finger had
swelled up some, they would cut your finger off. That's how cruel they
were.'' -- Parrott, on the treatment of Americans by Japanese soldiers
during the Bataan Death March.
Born in Mount Vernon, in the Skagit Valley, on July
20, 1920, Parrott spent his boyhood moving from town to town in Idaho,
following a father who looked for work as a carpenter during the Great
Depression.
Before joining the Army in 1940, Parrott met a girl
named Ruby at a vocational school in Weiser, Idaho. They married in
1947, after the war, and 54 years later they are still married and
living in the Lake Hills area.
Unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted identical twin
girls in 1955, Mary Ann and Cheryl Lee. But before all the good years of home and family, Parrott went through
hell.
In November 1940, he found himself in the tropical
wonderland of the Philippines. It would be more than a year before the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and for Parrott, a private first class
in the Army Signal Corps, the future was bright and the nights were
warm. Peacetime was easy, serving just four hours
a day.
On Christmas Day 1941 Parrot was sent to Corregidor and assigned to the
Medical Corps, as manila was declared an open city. Shortly after that
his Signal Corp outfit was sent to Bataan. Within a few days Parrott
hitched a ride on an ammunitions barge across manila bay to Bataan. Mr.
Parrott joined his outfit as a standby radio operator.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed
all of that. America was at war, and in early April 1942 the Japanese
captured Bataan on Manila Bay. Parrott and 70,000
other American and Filipino soldiers found themselves walking 55 miles
from the tip of the Bataan Peninsula inland to Camp O'Donnell.
Starved and mistreated, kicked, beaten and stabbed along the way, only
54,000 made it to the camp. Almost 10,000 died; the rest escaped into
the jungle.
Parrott believes that if not for one compassionate Japanese soldier who
he and five other marchers encountered along the way, he would not have
made it.
After five or six days of marching, they had fallen off from the main
pack, Parrott says. Up ahead, the soldier waved in a friendly, come-here
way.
``By the time he waved at us, I was on my last legs and I couldn't keep
up,'' Parrott said. The Japanese soldier said in
English: ``You, come here, come here,'' Parrott recalls. The men walked
over, their legs buckling underneath them. ``You
hungry?'' the Japanese soldier asked. His own troops off on maneuvers,
the soldier offered the men some leftover food -- one mackerel, cut into
five pieces, some rice and some sweet tea. He told the men he was a
cook, that he had been brought in as part of Japanese reinforcements. He
said he had no hatred toward Americans.
``I probably weighed about 80 pounds. When I was down there, somebody
would be dead next to me every morning I woke up. I decided I wasn't
going to die like the rest of them. There was no way I was going to go
to Boot Hill.'' -- Parrott, recalling Zero Ward at a POW camp in
Cabanatuan City.
At Camp O'Donnell, the POWs were slowly starving to
death. The men ate whatever they could find. If a stray dog or cat came
into the camp, the men would catch the animal if they could and skin it,
cook it and eat it. Parrott even ate cobra meat
one time when a Japanese guard stabbed the snake, yanked its fangs out
and barbecued it for the POWs.
The regular diet consisted of a watery rice stew for lunch and rice with
maggots and vegetable tops for dinner.
Parrott was later moved to another POW camp, Camp No. 1 in Cabanatuan
City.
There, Parrott came down with dysentery and beriberi. One day, he was
hauled to Zero Ward, an area under the camp's barracks that held other
men too sick to function. They were given no food
and no water -- just left to quietly stop breathing.
``I was put down there to die,'' Parrott says. ``I had no treatment of
any kind.''
It was a dreadful pit of a place filled with emaciated
bodies and broken spirits. Parrott saw that the men there had lost their
will to live. They talked about how their families had abandoned them,
how they did not receive any mail from them. But Parrott knew none of
the men got mail -- the Japanese didn't allow it. Parrott also knew the
Zero Ward inmates were losing touch with reality as their bodies
withered.
Parrott, however, refused to die. He was too young to die, he told
himself; he had too much to live for. He did not want to be buried at
Boot Hill, the makeshift cemetery at the camp where each grave held 15
to 20 bodies. After 10 days in Zero Ward, the Japanese guards gave up on
his dying and took him back up out of the death chamber.
He credits his desire to live, his desire to one day eat rich, healthy
meals, to drive a new car, to fall in love, to hug family and friends,
for keeping him alive.
Back home in Idaho, Parrott's parents, John and Clara,
had no idea what had happened to him after Japan captured Bataan. They
received a telegram saying their son was among the dead and missing,
along with another young soldier from Weiser. It was not until 1943, a
year after the march, that the couple received word their son was a POW.
Later, Parrott was allowed to send a 45-word telegram
to his mother: ``Please know that I am well. Am informing everyone of my
health. Hope that brothers and sisters are in good health. Give regards
to all friends. Pass my love to all relatives. Divine love to you and
Dad. Your son, Cecil W. Parrott.''
Although he wasn't the only POW to emerge alive from the Philippines,
Parrott's survival is nothing short of a miracle, say those who know of
the horrors.
POWs came home with stories of being beaten and tortured and witnessing
public executions in which their comrades were blindfolded and
decapitated.
``Camp O'Donnell was, for many, the most horrific experience of the
war,'' writes Hampton Sides in his current best-selling book, ``Ghost
Soldiers,'' published this year.
``It was the place where all the seeds of hunger and disease sown on
Bataan came to full fruition. Americans had not seen derivational
qrotesqueries on such a vast scale since the days of Andersonville, the
infamous Civil War death camp for Union soldiers in Georgia. One
prisoner later wrote, `Hell is only a state of mind: O'Donnell was a
place.'''
Twenty-seven percent of Japanese captives died during the war, compared
to 4 percent of Allied POWs held in German and Italian camps, according
to Sides' book.
In September 1944, Parrott was put on one of the
infamous Hell Ships, so named because of their horrendous living
conditions, and taken to Japan.
``That was one of the worst beatings I ever got. In fact, we called him
The Maniac because he was a known killer. He beat one guy, actually
broke his back with a 2 by 4.'' -- Parrott, describing a Japanese guard
who beat him after a day in the coal mines.
At Camp 17 in Omuta, Parrott and other POWs mined coal
for Mitsui Mining. Later he was taken to another city, Fukuoko, for more
dangerous and exhausting work. One day a large timber fell on his ankle,
nearly mangling it. He walked club-footed for awhile, but the ankle
eventually healed itself.
On another day, he was bloodied by a Japanese guard. The man accused
Parrott -- who then weighed all of 125 pounds -- of not saluting him,
and he beat Parrott to a pulp.
After three years of being around Japanese soldiers
and guards, Parrott learned to speak the language and is still fluent
today. Prisoners had to learn to count in Japanese because the guards
would call out their numbers and if they didn't respond they were beaten
over the head with a stick.
At night, he and other POWs wrote poetry and recipes -- filled with eggs
and butter and ``nothin' but good stuff'' -- on the backs of canned-food
labels. Anything to keep them going.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, killing about 135,000 civilians. On Aug. 9, another
bomb hit Nagasaki, killing about 70,000. Japan surrendered a few days
later, and the war was over.
But Parrott and other POWs in Fukuoka, situated between Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in southern Japan, did not know it.
They were told American planes were in the area on reconnaissance
missions, not to drop bombs. It wasn't until Aug. 19, four days after
Japan surrendered, that American troops showed up to release and feed
the POWs.
After 41 months as a prisoner of war, and after serving in the early
occupation forces, Parrott was flown back to Manila to s rest camp for
RAMPS (Repatriated American Military Personnel).
Next Mr. Parrott arrived in Novemeber of 1945 at the Veterans's General
Military Hospital in San Francisco.
He then was sent to Madigan Military Hospital in Fort Lewis for more
thorough medical treatment and necessary dental treatment.
Finally, Parrott was home, checking in and out of Fort Lewis,
receiving hugs from family and friends.
But he never got to see his father again. John Henry Parrott, 63, died
in a Weiser hospital from a lengthy illness shortly before his son's
rescue.
``I know back in 1951, when they met in San Francisco, they had no idea
how we were treated. I think it was stupid of the State Department, at
that time, to make the decision that they did against us, without even
knowing anything about it.'' -- Parrott, on the peace treaty that barred
any claims by Americans.
For years after the war, Parrott went on with his
life, trying to bury the memories and the horrors he lived through.
After graduating from Oregon State University in 1952, he worked 18
years as a Boeing engineer.
Then one day a couple of years ago, he got a call from
Lester Tenney, a former POW and retired Arizona State University history
professor, who was suing Mitsui and Mitsubishi. Suddenly Parrott was
part of a class-action lawsuit.
And he got to thinking.
``Our government stood behind the guys that were fighting Germany, and
they allowed their claim to go through. I don't understand why they
don't let our claim go through,'' Parrott says. Regardless
of what the peace treaty between the two countries says, Parrott
contends he and his fellow POWs are getting a raw deal.
In recent years, the State Department has testified in cases against
Mitsui and Mitsubishi, saying terms of the peace treaty with Japan
should be upheld.
Parrott has no ill feelings toward the Japanese; much of the reason is
the friendly soldier who may have saved his life during the death march.
In 1981, he returned to Japan for the first time and
tried to find the camps where he had lived, but they were gone. Only a
smokestack remained at one. He returned again last year to Japan and
stayed with the parents of a Japanese woman he met a few years ago at
Newport Hills Community Church. Coincidentally, the woman's grandfather,
an engineer, designed part of a coal mine where Parrott labored during
the war.
But such friendships don't change his feelings about the war, and
Parrott said he wants justice before he dies.
``I really think the American people should not forget
what these brave men went through.''
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