Campaigns: Philippine Defense campaign:
Defense of Nichols Field, Rizal, P.I. Dec. 8, 1941
Defense of Bataan, P.I. Dec. 24, 1941 to April 9, 1942



POW Camps:
April 9, 1942 to April 22, 1942 -- Made the Bataan Death March
April 22, 1942 -- Railway box cars from San Fernando to Capas, P.I. March to Camp O’Donnell
April 22, 1942 to July 1942, Camp O'Donnell, P.I.

July 1942 to July 1944, Camp Cabanatuan, P.I.
July 1944 to August 1944 -- Camp Bilibid, Manila, P.I.
August 25, 1944 to September 6, 1944 -- Hell Ship Noto Maru enroute from Manila, P.I. to Moji, Kyushu, Japan, 1035 POWs in forward hold.   I was in Company One, Number 29 Noto Maru roster.

September 6, 1944 to September 9, 1944 -- Moji, Kyushu, Japan by rail car to Hanawa, Sendai, Japan.
Sept. 9, 1944 to Sept. 15, 1945 -- Osarizawa, Sendai, Japan.  Sendai area Prisoner of War Camp #6 Hanawa, assigned Work Section 2, Number 81.   This was a Slave Labor Camp where the Japanese Army forced American POWs to work in the Osarizawa Copper Mine operated by the Mitsubishi Mining Company at Hanawa.
September 15, 1945 — Returned to control of American Forces on the Hospital Ship Relief in the Port of Shinagawa near Sendai, Japan.   Photo below taken in Houston, Texas 1945


Comments on Treatment:
        The inhumane treatment and the atrocities committed against me and my fellow Prisoners of War by the Japanese as we faced forced marches, beatings, torture, murder, starvation, diseases, slavery, and squalid living conditions defies belief.

        The degradation, the brutal treatment, torture and barbarism started from my first day as a POW and ended when I returned to U.S. Control.   My captors insisted that survival was futile because they showed me orders from Tokyo to massacre me and all other POWs immediately upon the landing of U.S. Forces on the Japanese homeland.   These orders were not carried out because the atomic bombing of Japan forced an early nonconditional surrender.   From the first they tried to starve us to death, work us to death and beat us to death.   They refused to treat POWs diseases in the hope that death would result.

        I was captured on Bataan and was forced to make the Bataan Death March.   The Bataan defenders, already exhausted, starved and diseased were forced to march for days in the tropical heat without, headcovering, without water, without food and without medications.   Those who were not able to continue the March were summarily beaten with rifle butts, bayoneted, shot or decapitated and left to die along the roadway.   Of the estimated 10,000 Americans on the March, it is estimated that 1,000 died.   Thousands of Filipinos died on this same March.

        The agony I endured on the Bataan Death March continued to Camp O’Donnell.   The filth of O’Donnell, coupled with extreme water shortage, meager rice ration, rampant diseases and brutal treatment resulted in a high daily death rate among the POWs.   In May, 1942, there were 8,000 POWs in O’Donnell and the death rate was 50 per day.   In a matter of months all would be dead.   In July, 1942, the survivors of O'Donnell were moved to Cabanatuan to join the POWs captured on Corregidor.        

        Historians agree that the Death March out of Bataan and the months at Camp O’Donnell are the two worst atrocities committed by the Japanese against Americans.   Cabanatuan was cleaner and the water supply better.   Slowly the death rate decreased but the malnutrition, disease (dry and wet Beriberi, Pellagra, Scurvy and avitominosis), along with Malaria, Denque Fever, Amoebic and Bacillary Dysentery, heart disease, jaundice and Diphtheria swept through the camp.   Staying alive was a real challenge because it was easier to give up and die than it was to live.   And in all this misery, the brutal and barbaric treatment from the Japanese continued.

        In August, 1944, as the Allied Forces got closer to the Philippines and as Japan suffered a labor shortage in their homeland, I was moved from Cabanatuan to Japan for the purpose of performing slave labor in a copper mine in Northern Honshu.   The Japanese transports used to carry POWs to Japan, came to be known as Hell Ships.   One thousand and thirty five of us were crammed into the forward hold of the Noto Maru. There was not enough room to stand up.   The tropical heat created a living hell and then the hatch covers were closed.   The hold was airless and the heat unbearable.   We were sick, starved and suffocating.   There were only buckets for bathroom facilities.   We were furnished one cup of water and two small rice rations daily.   Later the hatch covers were partially opened and this gave some air to the POWs at the center of the hold.   We were aboard the Noto Maru for twelve days.

        The Japanese did not mark or identify the POW transports in accordance with the International Law.   Midway to Japan the convoy in which the Noto Maru was traveling was attacked by a pack of American submarines.   This convoy lost several ships and at dusk one night we on the Noto Maru heard noise and felt the jolt of two torpedoes that ran just under us.   The jolt and the movement sounded as if we were in a small boat and had run over a big log in the water.   Apparently the US Navy had set the torpedoes to run deep in order to detonate below the waterline of Japanese warships.   The two deep running torpedoes fired against the Noto Maru ran beneath the low draft transport and spared the lives of 1035 American Prisoners of War.   Most of us almost welcomed a torpedo as it would have put a quick end to our pain and our suffering.   After the war, we learned that many unmarked transports carrying POWs were sunk by Allied submarines and Allied airplanes with the loss of thousands of Prisoners of War.

        Historians note that the Japanese frenzied efforts to ship all the POWs to Japan for slave labor work culminated one of the worst examples of Man’s cruelty to man ever experienced.   We landed in Moji, Japan, weak, starved, dehydrated and sick.   A three day train ride took us northward where POW work details were dropped off along the route.   I ended up at the Sendai area Prisoner of War Camp No. 6 at Hanawa, Japan.   This was a slave labor camp where we were forced by the Japanese Army to labor in the Osarizawa Copper Mine operated by the Mitsubishi Mining Company.   This copper mine is one of the oldest mines in Japan having been in continuous operation for more than 1300 years.   Mining methods have remained unchanged for centuries.   The Japanese miners, backed by the Japanese guards, forced us to work in unsafe and dangerous spots that were not shored up to protect us from falling rocks and boulders.   This resulted in injury and death to my fellow POWs.   We used open burning carbide headlamps to provide light with no safety features to detect explosive gas deposits.   We used hand pushed cars traveling on narrow rails to load and push a long ways out of the mine to the smelter.   As we filled our established quota of cars, the Japanese were ever increasing this quota.   The trip to the mine was about two miles, then down into the shafts to work all day, then back to camp which had no heat.   The food was meager rations of rice or millet and hot water to drink.

        I was issued two Red Cross individual boxes of supplies during this year in Hanawa.   The Japanese had looted many items.   After Japan surrendered, we discovered a warehouse full of Red Cross food boxes which the Japanese had kept from us!   The weather was cold in Hanawa with almost daily snowfall in winter.   My clothing was inadequate.   Each day we had only two hours of heat from small wood/coal burning stoves in the barracks.   It was a hard winter with long hours of hard work, starvation food rations, no medical care and brutal treatment from the Japanese Guards.

Summary:

        My treatment by the Japanese during my three and one half years as a Prisoner, was contrary to all civilized norms and certainly not in compliance with the rules adopted by the Geneva Convention regarding handling of POWs.
In summary, the treatment was brutal, bestial, barbaric, depraved, evil, inhumane, and senseless.   The testimony, developed by the International Military Tribunal during the War Crimes trials in Tokyo after the war, produced witness after witness of survivors who endured this same treatment.   The residual effects of the barbaric treatment dealt POWs at the hands of the Japanese are life long scars of physical and mental diseases, which do not heal.

A wonderment to me lingers to this day of how a nation of human beings could so grossly and so deliberately mistreat other members of the human race.   A true example of man’s inhumanity to man thrust upon us Americans whose only act was to have honorably defended our country’s territory against a foreign aggressor.

In our Christian spirit we can and we must forgive those who transgress against us — but we must not forget!   To forget could result in going back to a military weakness which would invite other barbaric nations to again take American POWs and subject them to inhumane treatment.

      James T. & Nancy Murphy
      E-Mail:   writer3181@verizon.net

      Photo taken, 1998


      Murphy's Bio in Text Only