AN
EXERT FROM WELDON HAMILTON’S BOOK
”Late Summer of
1941 and My War with Japan”
Upon arrival in Camp 17
We were all set up for a new experience in
these barracks. There was a row of rooms down the side hall into the back. Also,
we had a bathroom right in our building. We had a place to go, like a commode.
It wasn’t a commode, just an outhouse attached to the building. We had a
pegboard outside of our room and on the pegboard everyone would hang their
number. If you were in the room, your number hung on the “in room” line. If
you were at work you moved your peg down to “at work”. If you were eating at
the dining room, you’d have it hung there. If you were at the bathroom there
was a place to hang it there. So if you weren't where your tag said you were,
you were in big trouble. For example there were 13 of us in the room. If a guard
came by in the night and looked in your door and counted only 12 people, then he
would look at the pegboard and see if 12 were in the room. They never turned the
light off. There was one big bulb that hung in the middle of the room and kept
the whole room bathed in a bright light at all times. I don’t recall if it was
during the day. Surly, it was just at night. If one peg was moved down to the
bathroom, then he’d go down to the bathroom and see if someone was there. If
the count didn’t work out, you could bet somebody was going to get beat up.
For example, if it said that 13 were in the room and there were only 12 and he
went down to the bathroom and one was down in the bathroom, well, the guy in the
bathroom was in for a beating. So, any time we weren’t where we were supposed
to be, or if one of us went to the bathroom and left the tag on “bathroom”
and came back and laid down and went to sleep, the guard would come, find the
number and call out that number, then call you out and beat you. You were going
to get a beating if you weren’t you were supposed to be.
The Americans, Australians, and Dutch worked
in the coal mines. The British worked in a zinc factory. Although the coalmine
was hell in many ways, I’m we worked there instead of the zinc factories,
because they fired the furnaces and the story of that is pretty horrible. The
British who worked there looked horrible. Their skin was browned or scorched
with something because they fed these furnaces with temperatures up to 3500
degrees. They’d feed coal into these furnaces. As I recall, the British would
tell us they’d shovel for 15 minutes and jump in a water tank for about 15
minutes to cool off. In the coal mine, we worked in three complete shifts. The
work was endless. There was no change in the schedule. That meant we had eight
hours of working plus we had time tacked onto the end of our shifts to make up
for when we had lined up, marched over, got organized and went down into the
mines. We had to relieve the other guys just as they were coming off their
shift. This added an hour or two to the end of each shift so it ended up that we
were gone at our job for 10 to 12 hours. The shifts in the mine were continuous.
We were lined up inside the camp, counted off, and marched to the mine. The mine
had big buildings where there were workshops and people working around the mine.
We would go over into the actual mine area where the entrance trains where and
we’d be lined up again. There was a great enormous statue of Buddha. We were
required to bow down to the statue every day before getting on the train to go
down. We didn’t know what we were supposed to say, but we were to take off our
hats and bow at the same time. It sounded like they said, “Hats off”. We
would take our hats off, bow and say, “Hats off”. This seemed to work just
fine.
When we got this routine out of the way,
we’d all catch our train. The entrance to the mine was slanted at an angle
that appeared to be in the neighborhood of 45 degrees; however, it was probably
not quite that steep. This is where the trains would go down. As you looked down
into the mine, you’d see the track leading off on an inclined plane. Since the
mine was under the ocean, it was pointed down that way. When we were at the
bottom of the shaft, we could look back up and see a tiny pinpoint of life that
was the outside. It was an enormous entrance, 75 feet high. It was a long way up
to the top and a long ways down. Anyway, we’d get on the trains and down into
the mine we’d go. We normally worked on Dia Roku, which meant level six.
We’d get down to the bottom, unload from the trains, and go to our various
workstations. I was normally assigned to wall and roof bracing which was the
preparation part of the work. The last shift had been the coal shovelers. Now we
were the workers that would reconstruct and build the braces against the
ceiling, brace out the wall where it had been dug out. The next crew who would
come in would be the dynamite crew in my area. It was rotated in the various
areas. The crew that followed my particular shift was the dynamite crew. They
would come in and drill into the coal face. Normally, they would drill 125
holes. After they got all the wholes drilled, they would put dynamite in the
holes and as their day ended they would blow all the coal face down. When they
left, the shoveling crew would come in and they would spend their shift
shoveling the coal into the troughs and carrying the coal away. I worked down
there for a year.
My son Robert, who
lives in Montana, said, “Your story is good, Dad. It’s a great book, but you
left out the real part, the part you could not tell any of us kids, because not
only were we too young to understand, we were too young to fathom the depth man
can sink to in his quest for power over others. As an adult, I have read in
other books the things you could not tell us or write about. I understand your
reservations about reliving that hideous time and putting it down on paper.
Maybe I’m asking too much, but your story, as you tell it, is so full of
wonder and love; of the simplest moments of living we all take for granted; of
moments of joy and humor in those degrading years, without hope of deliverance;
of values lost or held in abeyance because your world had lost its mind. We need
to know the worst of it to fully evaluate the courage and bravery you were
blessed with as your eyes saw and your body felt the wrath of your captors. Dad,
tell the real story for those who did not come back. Tell why they did not
return and why we must not let something like this ever happen again-an addendum
to your story, short by necessity, because in the telling the images become so
real again it can only be endured briefly and reverently. Tell them, Dad.”
I said, ”Son, maybe your right. I think I’ll just write it down and let the
reader know why I could not fill in my story with the literal truth of those
years. It is almost beyond belief, but I’ll try my best for as long as I
can.”
I’ve already given the enormous numbers of those who fell during the death march, died at camp O’Donnell, died at Cabanatuan, on the hell ships, and in the Japanese prisons. More American POWs died in those Philippine prisons than in any foreign prisons before or since.
When I was moved
into Hospital #2 in the dysentery area with nine other men, within two weeks
those nine were dead. I was in different wards with different diseases for one
year and as far as I know, I was the only man to come out of those wards during
that time alive. Every morning when I woke up, five to seven men would be dead
from malaria or dysentery or for many other reasons. The men lay on filthy straw
with their mouths open, green blow flies crawling in and out while their last
gasps of life drifted away. All night long, I would listen to them struggle for
their last breath. Some died from just plain neglect, no name attached as a
reason for their death; some just gave up. Did you know that you can sit down,
close your eyes and be dead in 10 minutes or 3 days, and no one will notice
until you are covered with flies and fail to brush them off? Then that body,
along with many others, may not be buried for 4 days, because those still living
did not have the energy to drag the bodies out and dig holes in the hard ground.
The slit trenches that served as latrines were so full of bloody defecation that
sometimes a body fell in. The men were fighting to eat their pitiful rations of
sloppy rice, unable to keep dozens of blow flies off their mess kit. At the slit
trenches, men struggled to stand, and the trails back to the camp would be
sloppy with their bloody defecation. Other men walking on those same trails
would slip in their bare feet and fall, needing help to stand again.
I was so weak, I could not step over a 2 by 4 doorsill. I had to turn sideways and slide my feet over the sill. I had pellagra blisters 2 or 3 inches across my legs and hands. People with beri beri were swollen up like huge fat people, their testicles sometimes as large as volleyballs. And their penises as big as a large sausage. Generally, they swelled up until they burst; their bodily fluids drained out of them; and they died. Sometimes, the skin on their legs would split open and they would die of infection.
People developed large ulcers as big as a baseball all over their bodies. I saw ulcers over the spine and could not see the actual vertebrae sticking out while they died a slow, miserable death. I came down with diphtheria and when I entered the hospital ward, I was told they had already had 200 men die from the disease. It generally blocks the throat and the person chokes to death. I lay and listened most of the night to a man from my hometown slowly choking to death. Starting about midnight, his gasps became more and more labored until it was finally over at about three in the morning. I sat leaning against the building for 3 hours, a pleasant night, the stars shining clear and beautiful, heard the last gasp, and then silence.
In the Zero Ward because no one was expected to leave alive, the most likely to die in the night were lined up in the order of expected deaths. Sometimes it was called “St. Peter’s Ward”. I was there and I came out alive. How or why, I will never know.
The hell ship I was on took 62 days to get to Japan. There were 1000 men on board with nowhere to sit upright or even to lie down. When the hatches were closed, the heat was horrible; it cut out the light and air. At night no one was aloud to go topside to go to the toilet. We had 5-gallon cans in the middle of the floor and when they were full, they just ran over. We tried to stay as far away from them as possible so the liquid would not run over us or on us. We lay in the dark, wondering how many days, weeks or months we would be on this horrible ship. We finally made it to Japan, and strange as it seems, life got a little better. But, my story tells that part.
I could tell more, Robert, but I can’t bear the images any longer. All of this did happen and by the grace of God, I somehow survived. I don’t think the reader should have to visualize any more degradation of his fellow man, either. Suffice to say, man can endure the most horrible things and still come out whole on the other side. If people are reposed by what I’ve written, it is unfortunate, but this is only a small part of a long, unbearable period of terror, misery and death. Let us all vow to never let it happen again, and live our lives for gratitude for our beautiful country and all the freedoms we enjoy under the protection of our armed forces and the flag so many have died to protect.
This, my son, is my part of the real story. You were right; it did need to be told. It needed to be told from memory so memory will not become fiction. Memory is tiny when seen through the large end of a telescope. I hope I am preserving memory and all of its spirits, which have been wandering through my mind. Memory is selective and imperfect; yet as antique it has lasting qualities, especially when pulled from a shelf and read, because memory has need of help.