I was born November 15th 1920 in Alexandria, Louisiana.   I enlisted in the Army Air Force September 16th 1940 at Barksdale Field, Shreveport, La.   Transferred to Savannah, Georgia. and helped establish Hunter Field.   Shipped out to the Philippines November 1st 1941.   On board the President Coolidge arriving in Manila November 20th; set up a tent city at Fort McKinley.   On December 8th was awakened by the bombing of Nichols Field.   Quite a show.

On the 13th of December there was a request for 52 volunteers for a secret mission.   I was looking for action so I volunteered.   That night we loaded 90 thousand gallons of aviation fuel on board the Palawan (an inner island boat) and sailed about midnight.  The next afternoon we were spotted by a Jap sub-hunter plane.   He made 2 passes over us and we could see that he had a bomb under each wing.   For some reason only known to God, he did not attack.   That night we landed at San Jose, Mindoro.   There was a grass landing field there and our mission was to refuel planes coming up from the south.   We refueled a few B24s and an occasional Piper or Beechcraft from Bataan.   They would load up with sugar or alcohol.   On March 15th the Japs landed about 400 marines.   We destroyed our fuel and took off for the mountains.

After Bataan fell we split up into groups of 4 and crossed the island to Mansalay.   We then commandeered bancas and sailed to Panay.   After awhile we repeated the process and sailed to Cuyo.   Our intent was to get to Australia; before we could get another boat the Japs landed and took 29 of us prisoner (23 men hid in the barrio and the Japs didn't even look for them).   We were returned to Manila aboard a Jap aircraft tender and interned at Pasay schoolhouse.   I worked at Nichols Field under "the wolf" for a few weeks.   About this time a 300 man detail arrived from O'Donnell.   They were on their way to Tayabas.   Five of them died the first night so the Japs took me and four others to fill out the detail.   We rode for awhile and then marched all night and arrived at Tayabas about daybreak.   The Japs marched us into a dry river bed and said this was our camp.   No cover and only rocks to sleep on.   This was a road building detail and it wasn't long before the men started dying off.   The Japs took 2 truck loads of the worse cases back to Bilibid.

At the end of 6 weeks no one could work so they abandoned the detail.   The final truck took about 20 men and there were 5 men who were comatose.   The Japs wouldn't take them so Dr. Ashton gave them a shot to put them out of their misery.   I was sent to Bilibid and wound up on the "zero ward";  weighed 84 pounds.   Out of the 300 men at Tayabas, fewer than 100 survived.

On August 17th 1944 I shipped out to Japan aboard the Noto Maru.   American subs attacked the convoy off formosa but missed us and got a large oil tanker.   This lit up the sky.   Arrived in Hanawa Sept. 6th (it snowed the 9th);  worked slave labor in a copper mine for Mitsubishi the last year of the war and returned to American forces September 15th.

Met my wife to be (Mary Lois McCausland) in San Francisco.   She was in the Waves and we were married in uniform December 20th 1945.   Mary Lois passed away November 17th 1997.   We had two girls: Barbara Jean Rogers and Kellie Owen George and four grandchildren Elizabeth, Owen, Courtney and Austin George.