I enlisted in the Army in 1939. I was nineteen years old and a strapping 119 pounds! But when I got out of the Jap prison camps at the end of the war I only weighed 98 pounds. The thing was, I didn’t have much weight to lose! I was in the Signal Corps and was first trained as a “pigeoneer.” That meant I worked with messenger pigeons. This was a holdover from the old days before reliable radio communication when they had to use messenger pigeons to communicate with the front-line troops. They did this a lot in WWI. So, in the Signal Corps we used all forms of communication, from radios to pigeons! I got trained on Morse code and could key messages very quickly. We all could.
I was looking forward to going overseas and was excited to hear I was being posted to the Philippines. This seemed very exotic to me. I was just a kid from Brooklyn and here I was heading out to the Pacific. I finally arrived in the Philippines in May 1940 and was stationed first on Corregidor Island out in Manila Bay. The Philippines was considered good duty at that time. It was a tropical climate and totally different from anything I had ever seen. It took a while to get used to the heat and humidity, but after a while it was quite comfortable. Everything was just open to the breeze, and it would cool off at night enough to sleep. I couldn’t get over the tropical vegetation. It was all bright green and seemed to just burst out of the ground. Things could grow anywhere! Corregidor was a beautiful island. A lot of it was like a big, manicured tropical park. The lawns were all trimmed and were immaculate. Everything was landscaped meticulously, with big trees and paved sidewalks and large old buildings on the base. But after we surrendered and the Japanese had bombed and shelled it for months, you wouldn’t even think it was the same place. Those stately old buildings were just bombed-out shells, the trees were just splinters, and landscaping was totally destroyed. The place ended up looking like a moonscape. But before the war it was really a paradise.
I lived in the Topside Barracks with the Fifty-ninth Coast Artillery guys. There were big day rooms, like rec rooms, in the barracks. There were Ping-Pong tables, couches, and chairs. You could listen to the radio or read or write letters there. A large movie theater was next door to the barracks, and it was very popular. It was one of the few places to go at night. They always liked to come up with funny announcements before movies. Like before a good Western, there would be an announcement: “A five-man detail will be sent around after the movie to pick up spent brass cartridges!”
After that I was assigned duty as a radio operator in Manila on a transmitter using Morse key. I also had duties at Camp John Hay in Baguio up in the mountains on Luzon. On December 7, 1941, which was December 8 in the Philippines, I was roaming around Manila on a three-day pass. When we got word the Japs were bombing the airfields all leaves were canceled, and I went back to duty on the radio transmitter. After that we were very busy all the time trying to coordinate communication between the units in the field and other command headquarters in the Philippines and in Hawaii. Then the Japanese landed on Luzon, and it was just a matter of time before they got to Manila.
At 10 P.M. on December 31, 1941, the Japanese had entered the outskirts of Manila, and we were ordered to blow up our transmitter and report to pier 1 down on the waterfront, right next to the Manila Hotel, to catch a boat to be taken out to Corregidor. So we did as we were ordered, blew up our transmitter, and went down to the pier. It took a while for the boat to show up to take us to Corregidor, so we were just sitting there on the pier, kind of feeling sorry for ourselves, and it didn’t help that we could hear the music coming from the big New Year’s Eve party at the Manila Hotel next door. That was the fanciest hotel in the city, and the people at the party were wealthy Filipinos and a lot of U.S. Army and Navy officers and their wives. They were all dressed up and were partying and carrying on like nothing out of the ordinary was going on! Those were the kinds of things that were happening—crazy things, people acting like everything was okay, or maybe just ignoring how bad things were, or they didn’t want to admit how bad things were. Here we were evacuating the city with the Japs right on our tail, and they were still having a big fancy New Year’s Eve party at that beautiful old hotel. We just sat there on that pier and listened to the music and laughter coming out of that hotel and could barely even talk to each other. Later that night we finally got the word to move over to pier 3 where we caught a boat for Corregidor.
The first thing that happened when I got to Corregidor was that I smashed my right hand in a car door. Of course, this is the hand I used to key the Morse code, and it was a serious injury for a radio operator like me. It turned out I healed up okay, but this injury to my keying hand was in my records. I didn’t know it then, but smashing my hand in that door probably saved my life. Later, when the fighting on Bataan really got going, they shipped the “best” operators over there to maximize the communications capability during the fighting. Well, they looked at my records and saw this injury to my right hand, and that was enough to disqualify me from that assignment. All the radio operators who were shipped over there either were killed or ended up in the Death March. And thank God I missed out on that because I had had a broken hand!
At first things weren’t too bad on Corregidor. In fact, after the chaos and confusion and strangeness of Manila, on Corregidor it seemed like nothing had happened. We were getting bombed on occasion, but not much at first. Our radio unit got right to work. We ended up being assigned to the Malinta Tunnel at the back of lateral 12. The Malinta Tunnel was originally built as a road and trolley tunnel through Malinta Hill to connect the two ends of the island, and it was about 200 yards long. At some point they had dug branch tunnels out from the main tunnel. They called these “laterals.” There were quite a few of them, and some were long and had a few bends in them, like the hospital lateral which had its own exit out the side of the hill. That’s where I set up a transmitting station, just outside the entrance to the hospital lateral, so I could get a good signal and I could transmit to Honolulu. That’s how we kept in touch with the outside world.
As the situation deteriorated, we got more people moving into the laterals. There were administrators in MacArthur’s lateral, and he had a desk in there. General Moore also had his own lateral as island commander for his staff. But most of the other laterals were used for storage, except for the hospital lateral, of course, which kept getting more and more crowded as time went on. Most of the men on Corregidor were outside at the gun batteries or on the island defenses. This is something that people don’t understand. They think all the Army was jammed into the shelter of the Malinta Tunnel, but only a small fraction was in there.
The siege of Corregidor went on for quite a while, or so it seemed to us. We settled into a routine like you do anywhere, even though our circumstances were pretty dire! I used to sleep out on a ridge outside the west entrance to the tunnel. There was a nice breeze out there, and I could duck into the tunnel if there was a bombing raid or if shelling started. There was a kitchen set up outside the west entrance to the tunnel. In the morning I’d come down from my ridge, stop by the kitchen for a bowl of oatmeal, pickup a couple of sandwiches, and head into the tunnel for work. The latrine was also located outside the west entrance, and there was a machine shop out there, too. In fact, the ridge I slept on overlooked the machine shop; it was right above it. There weren’t many vehicles on the island that were driving around that I saw. Mostly there were ambulances that came to the tunnel, and some drove right down to the hospital lateral.
Sometimes I slept in the air shaft at the back of our lateral. But during the shelling it was dangerous because of falling rock in there. We shared lateral 12 with the finance office, and we were at the back. There is a picture you see all the time of the finance office guys, and I was just in back there with the signal section, but you couldn’t see us. Most of our transmissions were inter-island, but we could communicate with Honolulu, like I told you, and with Port Darwin in Australia. We were probably as up to date with what was going on in the outside world as anyone else on the island. And it didn’t look good, I’ll tell you that! It was pretty clear to us that nothing was coming in to the island, and the big brass got out, which was appropriate, I suppose. They also got out people who had special skills, and I wasn’t one of those, unfortunately.
Some days I’d see MacArthur on his daily walk before he was evacuated. He was always walking around outside, and because of this, I guess, the PR was that he was fearless. But the odds were in his favor of not getting hit. Corregidor was a fairly big island and the shelling couldn’t hit everything. But our man was Wainwright. He would sit down and talk to you like a grandson, like he was a member of your family.
After the fall of Bataan and especially near the end, the shelling was pretty much incessant, and everyone had to hunker down and keep under cover. Then the Japs landed on the island, and it was just a matter of time. I was there in the back of lateral 12 on the transmitter keying messages, and then someone said the Japs were right outside the tunnel, and I sent what became known as the last message from Corregidor: “I can hardly think. Can’t think at all…. The jig is up. Everyone is bawling like a baby. They are piling dead and wounded in our tunnel. Arms weak from pounding key long hours, no rest, short rations. Tired. I know how a mouse feels. Caught in a trap waiting for guys to come along and finish it….”
Of course, this kind of personal message (of which the above is only a part) was against all regulations, but at that point what were they going to do to me?
Then that was it. It was all over and we surrendered. Someone said a Jap tank was coming up the road to the tunnel, and we all figured he would just drive down the main part of the tunnel and turn the turret from side to side and shoot down the laterals and kill us all. So I went way to the back of lateral 12 and tried to take cover. But then they said the tank wasn’t coming, and we were called out into the main tunnel for the surrender formalities, and some Jap officers appeared. Let me tell you, it was a shock to see them after being shelled and bombed and chased by them for months. And I just thought to myself, well, there they are, the hated Japs. They were short and kind of strutted into the tunnel and shouted some commands. An interpreter told us we had to kneel, and I was tapped on my shoulder by a saber, and then we were filed out the west entrance. There were a whole lot of us standing there just outside the tunnel overlooking the North Dock, and nobody was saying a thing. It was just total silence. We could see General Wainwright go down to the dock to be taken to Manila for the formal surrender. He got into a boat with some of the Japs, and as they pulled away from the dock we all saluted, all together, no one told us to, but we all just stood there silently and saluted, and most of us were crying.
After the surrender I don’t think the Japs knew what to do with us. We weren’t confined or anything for a couple of days. They didn’t have any food for us, so we were allowed to scrounge for food back around the barracks areas and mess halls. Then I was pulled out with some other guys and taken to an area where there were Japanese wounded. Each of us had to attend to one Japanese guy. I had to take care of this guy who was assigned to me, wipe his brow, give him sips of water, and so on. We were ordered to do this, but there wasn’t any brutality. It was like they wanted us to help them out, and I didn’t really mind it. This went on for two or three days. Then they took us back with the others and things changed. We were rounded up and taken down to the Ninety-second Garage area. This was a seaplane base with a big concrete tarmac and a ramp down to the ocean to launch the planes. There were a couple of big hangars, and they were just skeletons from the bombing and shelling. They herded us out there onto the concrete and there was not a bit of shade, and we were just left out there. The area was surrounded by Japanese guards, so we couldn’t go anywhere. We just had to sit out there on the concrete in the sun, and it was miserable. After being so hot all day, at night we all got chilly, and a lot of us were sunburned so that made the chill at night worse, We used any bits of cloth or scraps of sheet metal for shade, and we just sat out there for a week or two without much food or water. This was our first experience with what we were going to become very familiar with, which is how badly the Japanese treated prisoners.
So we were finally loaded into a rusty old freighter and hauled to Manila and unloaded on the beach there. Then they paraded us around the city for a while on the way to Bilibid Prison in Manila, where they kept us for about two weeks. Then they transported us to the Cabanatuan camp.
I was only at Cabanatuan until November of 1942 when they shipped me to Japan. I arrived at Honshu on November 27, 1942. The Japanese had me do all kinds of things. I helped build a dock, and I worked at a rock quarry and a steel mill. The worst thing was the brutal guards. There was just no reason for the things they did and the way they treated us.
I was liberated in 1945, and I stayed in the Army until 1949. But my years as a POW never really left me, and I had a lot of health problems. The most serious was that I was disabled by TB and ended up in a TB -ward in Denver. I was laying there and all the guys in this TB ward got to talking, and it turned out that probably 90 percent of us in there had been POWS. I ended up working as an air traffic controller and am a member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. Those are the only guys who I can really talk to about what happened during the war. They’ve been there, and, you know, really there’s no way anyone can imagine what it was like except for them. After all my experiences, people always ask me what I think about the Japanese. To this day I don’t hold a grudge toward the Japanese in general, but I can never forgive those brutal guards.