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
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.
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.
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. Murphy
E-Mail:
writer3181@verizon.net