Teen age Joe Trejo spent more than three wretched years in the living death of Japanese prison camps and was the youngest prisoner of war in World War II.
The two are worlds apart now, but they have something very much in common. Given the toll of years, theirs is the same face in the mirror. For they are one and the same. How one grew and matured to become the other is the stuff of fiction but a fact of life. Life at its grimmest.
To meet Joe Alexander (he was known as Trejo until he was 21 when he had the best of reasons to change names). It is hard to conceive that this man of so few words who sees the world through eyes as gentle as spring mist suffered some of the cruelest treatment imaginable. Thinking back on his ordeal now, he can say with the hindsight of decades past, "It was probably my youth that saved me".
Despite the ravages of his experience, Alexander wears his years well. His hair is full and dark and his face is as smooth as chamois cloth. And then there are those eyes, like deep reflective pools, that have opened wide in terror.
When Joe Alexander was growing up in San Antonio, his was a life hardly fit to live. He survived in a cold, loveless household with an aunt and a grandmother who made it piercingly plain he was not wanted. He had been told he was illegitimate and that his mother had died when he was very young.
Scrappy and, by his own word, mean, he waded into his surroundings with his fists.
"The other kids were not allowed to play with me because I was so mean, he recalled. "Their parents said I'd wind up in prison. I did, but not the kind they were thinking of."
Restless as a teen-ager and wanting a change, Alexander went with his grandmother to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to enlist in the Army. "They did not ask for a birth certificate or any kind of personal records," he said. "All they did was ask me if I wanted to sign up, and I said "Yes", and that was it."
The date was July 7, 1941. Joseph was 14 years old.
He took basic training at a civilian airfield in Albuquerque, NM (now the site of Kirtland AFB). Although he had he had wanted to be an infantryman, he was assigned to the Army Air Corps and trained as a maintenance ordnance technician. Alexander's first duty station was half way around the world at Clark Field, now Clark AB in the Philippines. As a member of the 440th Ordnance Aviation Bombardment Squadron, his job was to load bombs on the squadron's B-17s. He also made many friends, none of whom were aware he was under age.
Pearl Harbor came, the nation went to war and Alexander was found out. He was told by his first sergeant that a war zone was no place for a 15-year-old. He would be going back to the States as soon as transportation could be arranged.
Soon the boy soldier was scheduled to depart on a troop ship that was evacuating civilians from the Philippines. The ship, however, never left dock; the Japanese bombed it in the Manila harbor. Alexander realized the awful truth; he was not going anywhere, at least not right away.
The fact that he was under age was forgotten. Like so many others, the war was his to fight now. And he was terrified. He had enlisted because he needed a change, but this?
Everyday the Japanese made daylight, low-level runs on Clark, mercilessly bombing and strafing the base. Half the bomber force was lost and there was a heavy toll in lives. The relentless pummeling continued and steadily worsened. With no help at hand, Alexander's squadron sought refuge on Mindanao, another island in the Philippine chain, that lay about 500 miles south of Luzon. It did not help. The Japanese would not be slowed.
In May 1942, Maj. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, the Commander of U.S. Army Forces, Far East, wrote that "we are subject to terrific air and artillery bombardment and it is unreasonable to expect that we can hold out for long. We have done our best . . . although beaten we are unashamed." He surrendered the Philippine Islands.
For Joseph Alexander death may have been a kinder blow. But he didn't know it at first.
Japanese soldiers split the captive Americans on Mindanao into groups and herded them to carious camps. Alexander said of his captors and the camps: "There were no barbed-wire fences. They fed us well. They were rough on us but they weren't mean. We weren't mistreated."
Three months later the Americans were told they would be going to Japan as prisoners of war. And the fears of a 15-year-old boy for his very existance became starkly real.
"I was scared", Alexander said. "I broke down. Others also panicked and cried. We just didn't know what the hell was going to happen to us."
It wasn't long before he and they found out.
"They herded us aboard ship like cattle and treated us like animals." Alexander said, those gently brown eyes filling and overflowing and his voice cracking as the flood of memories overran 40 years.
The prisoners were packed into the hold so tightly there was no room to stand. To add to their wretched mess, they were denied use of toilet facilities. There was only the hold. The stench was unbearable.
The only food was hardtack. In desperation to slake their consuming hunger and thirst, they drank their own urine and ate their own excrement. They were three months at sea and twice torpedoed by American submarines. Some 20 men died.
Arriving in Japan, Alexander and about 500 others were taken to the seaport city of Kawasaki to work in steel mills that were turning out structural components for ships.
The prisoners labored from dawn till dark seven days a week. The only meal each day was a cup full of maize - dried corn usually used as chicken feed. To be sick was unheard of. Manpower was needed in the mills. And always they were subjected to constant beatings at the whim of their captors, who used walking canes and cudgels to make their points.
"Many times after the long days had ended, the guards would make us stand at attention all night or put us outside in the cold or threaten to kill us because one of them wasn't happy about something we said or did. The next morning we would go to work without any sleep or anything to eat. This would go on for two or three days before they would give us something to eat, but we never got to rest.
"We marched to work before daylight and would pick up orange peelings or whatever we cold find on the street to eat, or if we saw trash cans along the way, we would get food out of them - whatever we could find. If they caught us doing it, they would beat us for stealing".
A delicacy for the starving prisoners was to crisp orange peels on ingots of hot steel in the mills.
Alexander was at the Kawasaki steel mills for about a year before he and some of the other were moved to the neighboring city of Shinagawa. The treatment was not better.
The captives were marched daily to the city's steel mills or to or to the harbor to load 100-pound bags of rice on barges. The more work they did, the more was expected of them. And in spite of their weakened physical condition and mental anguish, they kept going or suffered the consequences.
Alexander recalled one instance one the guards put a Marine in a pit and beat him over the head without letup. He didn't know what the man had done to so infuriate the Japanese, but "they beat that man till they beat the air off his head." However, the Marine did not die and they did not break him! For some reason the Japanese feared him and left him alone after that. They called him "Superman".
The Japanese soldiers on Mindanao had been "fighting troops, regulars". Alexander recalled, who had treated the Americans fairly. The men guarding them in Japan were "home guard" or "reserves" who had not the slightest feeling for their prisoners. At time the Japanese guards would strike up conversations with prisoners, talk to them about life in the United States, tell them about the schools they had attended there and then turn around and beat them for no apparent reason.
Alexander spent a year and a half at Shinagawa before he was moved to Omori. It wasn't long before the starved, emaciated captives discovered where the food was stored.
"We stole food from this big warehouse," Alexander said "Most of what we stole was sugar. The guys would find the oddest places to hide the food - under their armpits, taped to their stomachs, carried inside papers. The guards would shake us down, and if they found anything would beat the hell out of us for stealing.
"Sometimes they would come in at three in the morning, wake up the whole camp, barracks by barracks, and have us all stand at attention because someone was caught stealing."
In this place where men were beaten, broken, humiliated and starved, Alexander got a measure of mercy. "A Japanese warrant officer found out I was the youngest prisoner. He felt sorry for me because I was so young.
Alexander was detailed to take care of chickens for the Japanese guards and picked up the nickname "chicken boy". He put his position to good use.
"I stole eggs and took them back to the guys. We ate them raw". He didn't steal chickens, however, because he figured the soldiers kept close count of them.
Occasionally the captives came across an English-language newspaper that informed them of the war's progress. And in spite of being cut off from the rest of the world, they had an idea that the war was drawing to a close. Their captors started treating them more humanely.
Through the grapevine the prisoners also found out about the awesome devastation wrought by the atomic bomb. And it was over.
"We woke up one morning and all the guards were gone." Alexander said the Japanese soldiers had deserted the camp. "We didn't know how to act. We started running around cheering, hugging each other and crying. We broke into the storehouse where they kept the food." Some of the men thirsting for revenge, wanted to go into the city and kill everyone in sight.
When American B-29s dropped 50-gallon drums of food to them, it was definite. They were free. The war was over!
But amid all the joy of release, there was still tragedy. Some of the starving men could not restrain themselves and in their eagerness to satisfy their hunger, gorged themselves with the food and died from the shock to their systems.
A few days after the prisoners' release, U.S. ships sailed into the harbor to pick them up. "We were crying, laughing and hollering," Alexander said. "They told us the war was really over and gave us cigarettes and anything else we wanted." Once aboard a hospital ship, they were given physicals and clean clothes.
"I was covered with lice." Alexander remembered. " We lived with lice. We were covered with them all the time." he added, reflecting even now how the pleasure of having a hot shower after 3 1/2 years of being doused with occasional buckets of cold water.
The men were flown to a hospital in Manila where "everyone was nice to us - the doctors and nurses. They knew we had been prisoners of war for several years. The mess halls were open 24 hours a day." Good thing, Joe weighed just 85 pounds when he returned.
A few days later the ex-prisoners boarded a ship for the return crossing to the United States. It was a belated Birthday present for Alexander. He had been released from prison on August 25th, two days after his birthday. He was 19 years old now, with a lifetime already behind him. He was going home to another.
From the Army's Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco he called his grandmother in San Antonio. "After the surrender at Mindanao, they had told her I was dead." Alexander said. "I had been gone a year before she know I was alive." He smiled. "She was glad to hear from me."
The returnees were treated royally; San Francisco opened its heart to them. They were taken out on the town to USO functions and bused to Hollywood to see the sights. Nothing was too good for the ex-prisoners of war. At Letterman, Alexander received a Purple Heart for wounds he received on Mindanao. His next stop was the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston.
"I was at Fort Sam in the hospital for about a year as an outpatient," Alexander said. They ran all kinds of tests on me - physical and psychological." Altogether Alexander spent almost two years in Army hospitals before he was declared fit to return to active duty.
It had been a long recuperation, a lot of coping. But there was more to come. He had found out that the cold, impersonal woman he had known as his "aunt" was in reality his mother. It was a deep shock. She had been legally married then abandoned and hadn't been able to deal with approaching motherhood. Young Joe came to grips with the truth. To erase the stigma of illegitimacy he had lived with all his life, he legally claimed the name of the father had had never known and had his record changed accordingly. Joe Trejo was no more.
Returning to active duty, Alexander was assigned to the motor pool at Kelly. There were short tours to other places after that, but when Alexander retired at 37 as a tech sergeant he had spent 17 years at the base.
He remained at Kelly as a civilian and has been working as a Civil Service employee ever since, first in the supply and logistics areas and now in his present position in SA-ALC's Distribution Directorate where he expedites parts for use in the TF39, J79, F100 and T56 engine overhaul programs.
Outwardly hale and hearty, Alexander continues to live with the effects of the years spent in Japanese prison camps. Severe malnutrition and the brutal treatment ravaged his body, and he will be on medication for the rest of his life. There are also heart problems to contend with.
Some men would think one of the consequences of being a POW wasn't so bad, however, "Because of working with hot steel, "Alexander said, "I lost all the hair on my arms and face. It started coming back when I was about twenty-two. Even now I only have to shave once a week.:
Joe is married to the former Norma Henson and has two grown sons and two grandchildren. "I met Norma through my uncle who owned a restaurant, "he said, adding that she understands when he wakes up screaming in the night. "She know what happened to me and that I never had a teen-age life. I went from being a kid to being a man overnight. "It is easy to see that, because of his experience, Alexander is fiercely protective of his family.
It is just a clear that Alexander is not a bitter man. Despite the cruelties he suffered, he feels no malice toward the Japanese.
Alexander also has great praise and utmost respect for the late General Wainwright, who likewise had been a POW and later became the post commander at Fort Sam Houston. "His door was always open to a fellow ex-POW," Joe said. "He was a very nice man. I have been to his office and his home. He could have very important people waiting to see him, but if you were an ex-POW, he saw you first!"
Joe does not wear his experiences on his sleeve. Many are still so painful. When pressed, though he will let his memories and feeling trickle out in short, to-the-point word pictures.
With great sadness, he remembers the more than a thousand men aboard the prison ship that sailed to Japan from Mindanao. Less than half ever saw American soil again. They were plagued by dysentery, beri-beri, beatings, starvation, the freezing cold and terrors of the mind.
He is grateful that he had the opportunity to come to an understanding with his long-estranged mother before her death and can smile when talking about a plaque on a wall in his old high school honoring World War II dead. "My name is up there," he reveals.
He admits freely that it wasn't easy to readjust after his return from Japan, that he had a nervous breakdown, and that he had to go back to the hospital for therapy. He is frank about being a POW. "Unless you've been through it yourself, it is hard to imagine going through something like that," he said simply.
It has been more than forty years since a scrawny, unloved kid named Joe Trejo bluffed his way into the Army because he "needed a change". He wonders what direction his life would have taken if that ship had not been sunk in the Manila harbor so long ago.
Last July (1981) Joseph Alexander observed 40 years of government service, encompassing both his military and civilian careers and fully intends to keep on working for a while longer.
A staunchly patriotic man, he proudly admits that "when I see the American flag, I still get tears in my eyes. It makes me feel good."
The man with two names, two lives but a singular strain of courage has that same effect on those who meet him. Just knowing Joe Alexander makes you feel good!
The Alexanders reside at:
9407 Fernglen
San Antonio, TX 78240
phone: (210) 690-0837
E-Mail Address:
joealexander@sbcglobal.net