RALPH W. WALDEN REMEMBERS

Defense of Corregidor & 40 months as a POW of Japan


                 

Ft. Drum "The Concrete Battleship"

Btry. E 59th CAC Philippines




    Born Oct. 5, l921, raised on a farm in Arkansas, and graduated from high school in 1940.   My first job was as a "hired hand" for a neighbor farmer for a few months.   Pay was $l5:00 per month including food and lodging.   I enlisted at Jefferson Barracks, MO. in Feb. l941 at age 19.   I would like to say that I joined for patriotic reasons as the war was raging in Europe, but I can't as I was out of work and the Army promised a secure job and pay of $21.00 per month plus travel, good food and clothing.   I got the travel and secure job but the good food and clothing that were not to be had during the 40 months that I was a Prisoner of War.   I was sent directly to Ft. McDowell, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay for clothing issue and await transport to the Philippines.   We arrived at Corregidor in April, 1941.   There was a couple weeks of basic training at Kindley Field before my assignment to Ft. Drum.

      Ft. Drum
      Unit training was on the 14 and 6-inch guns.   There was many maintenance and housekeeping chores to be done, chipping rust and spreading red lead.   I guess the worst was cleaning the sump.   I enjoyed a trip by motor launch to the nearby beach every few weeks and once a three-day trip to Manila.  I was a member of the basketball team and enjoyed the trip by motor launch to Corregidor to compete with other batteries.   A few weeks before the war began I was assigned to Ft. Mills on Corregidor to be an observer artillery observer for Ft. Drum.


    FT. MILLS~ CORREGIDOR ISLAND
    The island was about three and one half miles in length and shaped like a tadpole.   The Bataan coast was 3 miles distant.   Our observation station was manned by three men and located within a few yards of Battery Cheney with 12-inch guns.   It was on the edge of a 400-foot cliff overlooking the sea.   On Monday morning Dec. 8 the news spread of the Pearl Harbor attack and America was at war.   My war began few days later with a major air attack using many bombers and fighters.   This was the only time that I got to fire a shot during the five months siege and that was from my 30 caliber Springfield rifle, model l903.   The airplane was at treetop level with his machine guns blazing and the pilot in clear view.   Thus began four months of bombs and shelling.   We were permitted to could take cover in nearby Battery Cheney.   There were some night air attacks that were brilliantly lighted with the AAA search lights.   Our food ration was reduced after a month or so and much of it was rice.   We had no targets toward the sea.   A week before Bataan fell I was ordered to Ft. Drum's station at Ft Frank.   It was on the night the earthquake struck and I was in Topside Barracks awaiting transport.

    FT. FRANK ~ CARABAO ISLAND
    The Island's position was less than a half-mile from the mainland.   This was another Coastal Defense Fort with 12-inch guns.   My duty was the same as on Ft. Mills.   We had 240-millimeter mortar shells coming from Cavite area.   They ceased after a few days and concentrated mainly on Corregidor.   I could not see Ft. Drum from either here or Ft. Mills.   The view of Corregidor through our scopes was excellent.   I watched with awe the pre-invasion bombardment of Corregidor.   An artillery observer in a balloon would rise over Bataan and the bombardment would begin.   A few days before our surrender the powder magazine of Battery Geary blew up and made a huge cloud over Corregidor.   The flashes on Corregidor were constant on the night of the invasion.   Ft. Drum fired constantly on the landing forces.  The order to surrender came on May 6.   We were ordered to destroy all arms and equipment by noon.   I threw my rifle into the sea and worked for hours empting a 12in gun powder magazine.   The Japanese soldiers arrived and set up their machine guns before we assembled at the dock.   We were allowed to take with us only the clothes we wore, pistol belt with canteen and mess kit.   It was a formal, orderly surrender.   I think that it would have been a much different situation had we known what the future years would bring.   We loaded aboard barges and it was off for the unknown.

    I feel that my part in this defense was more as an observer than a participant but I did the job to which I was assigned and the enemy never challenged us from the sea.


    MY 40 MONTHS AS A PRISONER OF WAR
    (It could be called a slave laborer)


    BATANGAS PIER
    We unloaded on a long pier formed a single line and began passing large rocks to fill bomb craters.   That went on all night with no break, food or drink.   The Jap soldiers off duty occupied boats tied up along the pier and they celebrated and partied all night.   The following day we continued to pass rocks and at nightfall the strain was showing, it was so hot with no water or food.   That night half of us were allowed to sit in formation but could not lie down to sleep.   It we were caught napping with our head down on our arms the guards rudely aroused you with a rifle butt.   Morning finally came and still no water.   Our group consisted of both Ft. Drum and Ft. Frank personnel.   Our ranking officer was Col. Kirkpatrick of Ft. Drum.  He showed his courage with demanding that it was time for rest.  We were given water and after a short break formed ranks for a march to a nearby open place where the Japanese officials were seated.   There were musical instruments, I can't remember how many or what kind, and we performed a pass-in-review!   Following that bit of entertainment we walked back to the pier area and entered a metal warehouse with concrete floors.   While there we did no work, Food was two meals of rice daily and drinking water was plentiful.   I saw no beatings while there.   I did watch a Japanese officer really slapping and punching a Japanese private for something.   After 20 days of this we loaded on barges again.   The barge trip to Manila was several hours where we unloaded into chest deep water on the beach.   We formed on the beach for the Parade of the American Prisoners down Quezon Boulevard, Manila.   There were thousands more POWs that made that march that day.   Finally we arrived at Bilibid Prison, Manila.

    BILIBID PRISON
    We remained here only a few days.  Nothing to do here but wait and try not to attract the attentions of the guards.   Chow remained the same... rice.   There were many roll calls and standing in line for a long time.   Beds were the concrete floors with no bedding and it was very hot.

    CABANATUAN NO. 3
    The trip to the town of Cabanatuan lasted several hours where we stayed one night in a schoolhouse.   It was so crowded that I found a place underneath the house.   The ground was wet and muddy so I found a piece of tin roofing, placed it on two school desks and spent the night there.   Next morning after the rice breakfast we began a hike that lasted for several hours on a hot, muggy day.   Pvt. Sternbergh of Ft. Drum and I shared a canteen of water.   Camp No. 3 was a large camp of split bamboo construction with thatched roofs.   Water was sufficient but no showers.   Latrines were dug trenches in the open with no cover from the rain and sun.   Ours was located at the bottom of a slope, which made it dangerous to get at with the ground wet.   It was large enough to fall into and some did.   The latrines were later improved with a wooden structure that had a roof and seats with a lid.   Flies were a major problem at this camp, especially around the latrines.   Our American commanders tried to control them by offering cigarettes for flies caught.   Yes, I was a smoker and this is the only time I ever trapped flies to trade for smokes.   Food was three meals per day.   Mornings the rice was cooked wet (Lougou).   Dinner and supper it was cooked dry with hot soup.   It could hardly be called soup, as it was almost water.   There was never any Carabou chunks in it even though there some slaughtered.   Guess there were just too many prisoners to give everyone a piece Some kind of dried fish cooked to shreds were added sometimes, the bottom of the cup would have some fish eyeballs.   The soup contained a plant with tough fibrous stems that we called "whistle weed".   Sometimes carrot tops were added.   I had a tough time adjusting to the diet.   After a couple months I was losing weight, had diarrhea or dysentery, weak and dehydrated.   I lay down on ground by the latrine for a long time and Pvt. Sternbergh brought powdered charcoal to take.   It was the only medicine available.   It was this camp that I had my first shave with a mess-kit knife as no razors available.

    Four Ft. Drum men face the firing squad. 
    These men were missing from our barracks soon after our arrival.   Two were friends.   They were later captured, tied to poles by the guard house, brutally beaten often for a couple of days.   During our evening meal they were led to their shallow gravesites located in close view just behind the rice pots shed.   The firing squad consisted of eight soldiers armed with rifles and one officer.   Four soldiers were kneeling and the other four were standing just behind them.   All went down together. I could see one man still moving and the officer in charge finished him with his pistol.   It was difficult to watch and impossible to forget.   There was no work here except for a few details out of camp to gather firewood.   After two or three months of this I was selected to leave this camp with a work group.   We entered Cabanatuan # 1 for about a week.   While there four of us were chosen for a burial detail.   The Zero Ward in the hospital was a sight to behold, so named for the chances of coming out alive was zero!   Patients were lying on bamboo slat raised platforms, no pad to lie on, scantly dressed and some naked.   They were all just skin and bones, except those that suffered with Beriberi, and those were puffed and swollen.   We rolled this naked corpse on a make-shift litter, carried it short distance to a prepared grave about two feet deep, placed him in it and shoveled in the dirt.   The burial detail and no Chaplain or others there to offer a prayer, I think that no one spoke a word.   It was so very sad.

    We left this camp with about 200 men, arrived in Bilibid Prison the same day and stayed a night or two, then left for Ft. William McKinley a few miles from Manila.   It was a permanent prewar camp with solid wooden barracks with showers and plenty of water.   Our work there was at Nielson Field.

    NIELSON FIELD & FT WILLIAM McKINLEY
    Work on the airport was making a cut in a five-foot bank of soil and rock with pick & shovel.   This was loaded into mine type push cars on tiny tracks, pushing them to the fill area.   This was hard, brutal work in the very hot sun and lots of rain.   There were many other days I went with small groups out of camp to Manila area for day jobs.   I often went to a POL area and loaded 55-gallon drums of oil onto trucks.   We leaded them with four men by grasping the tiny rim of the drum and struggling to get it into the high bed of a truck.   Another detail was at warehouse by the river where we unloaded cement barges.   Cement bags, some of them made of woven grass, not paper, were stored inside the barge in a closed space with no air circulation at all.   Breathing cement dust and with the terrific heat inside of that barge was too much!   We rotated those inside with the others that carried it to the warehouse.

    Guards here were very brutal.   One day after we returned from work, we stood at attention in formation, listened to the Jap commander berate us for a long time, then watched them punish a POW by powerful blows with a pick handle (a favorite method of punishment).   He stood for over 20 blows before falling.   Another time our camp leader took a complaint to the Jap commander that the food was insufficient.   Apparently he thought otherwise for we (the entire detail) went before a guard, bent over and grabbed our ankles, and received one solid pick handle blow to the butt.   I wasn't hurt and don't know if others were.   It was not unusual for them to have a public beating after we returned from work.   Diet was of rice and watery soup, which was woefully lacking nutrients, and soon it began to show.  Perhaps it was a vitamin deficiency that caused my scrotum (and others) to get raw and swollen.  For some relief we used black axle grease.  After a year or more I had eye problems, perhaps an infection, my vision has been permanently impaired since.   Weight loss affected all of us.   I believe that everyone lost at least 25 percent of their normal weight.   Many suffered from wet Beriberi, the kind that caused swelling of the body, and dry Beriberi that caused feet pain but no swelling.   I had the wet kind that was very painful.   One time the entire camp received immunizations consisting of a series of eight shots spaced a few days apart...first in the right arm, then in the right breast, then the left breast, then in the left arm.   The next four shots were the same.   I never learned what they were for.  These are the only shots that I ever received while a POW.   We worked six days per week with Sundays off.   The Manila newspaper printed in English could sometimes be smuggled into camp, so we kept up with the Jap version of the war.

    In late l943 we began to get wages, l0 centavos per day for the Enlisted Men and the Officers got more.   We could buy from vendors.   I remember the peanut brittle candy and the 'hair tobacco', so called because it was processed in strings that resembled hair.   Now I would not have to pick up so many cigarette butts to support my habit.   I believe the peanut brittle was the only sweet substance I received while a POW in the Philippines.   The food continued to be a small ration of rice and watery soup.   Oh, how I missed the American food!   The talk was always of food, never of the opposite sex, as one would expect of the young soldiers.   Our clothing wore out and we were in rags.   I did receive a pair of G.I. shoes at this camp.   I remember making a pair of shorts from a burlap bag.   The highlight of this camp was my receiving a small package from my parents with a letter...the only parcel and mail that I ever got from home while a POW.   The parcel had bouillon cubes, canned sardines and other foods.   There was a razor with blades.   I think it weighed about five pounds.   We all had hope that someday the war would end and knew that America would win but deep in our hearts we knew that we just might be alive to see it.   Treatment at this camp was the worst of any of them.   We were here more than one year when the orders came to move.   This time it was to another airfield near Manila.

    ZABLIN FIELD
    Our work here was laying a rock topping on a runway.   We unloaded the trucks of rock then broke them with a pick and fitted them into a one-foot thick layer on the runway.   The work never varied with other jobs or day jobs in other places.   Food was same here except sometimes we could get a coconut.   There was unsweetened tea to drink.   Treatment was much better than at Nielson Field.   The barracks were located near the runway, their walls and floor were of split bamboo and they had thatched roofs.   Bedbugs were severe in the barracks at night but we did not have the dreadful body lice that we were to experience in Japan.   We dug trenches between the barracks for protection in event of an air raid.   After several months here the air raid did come.   American planes, both bombers and fighters, suddenly appeared and the bombs fell again, expect this time it was friendly fire.   The damage they did to our barracks were not very friendly and I know some of us were injured.   A POW who was driving a truck at the time of the raid picked up a piece of a plane in the bed of his truck.   What a joyous sight...American planes again!   We finally realized that we would have freedom again if we just stayed alive long enough.   That was the end of our work on the airfield.   We were trucked to Manila and into Bilibid Prison once more.   This happened the last week in September 1944.

    I had worked on the airfields two full years.   We were never allowed any assembly or entertainment, never a motion picture of any kind, radio or reading material except there was an encyclopedia at Nielson, the only reading material I ever had while a POW.   We never played cards either, just worked, rested, and dreamed of the food and freedom that we once enjoyed.   I had been a POW for 29 months in the Philippines.

    VOYAGE OF THE HOKUSEN MARU
    This third stop at Bilibid Prison was just a few days.   In the first week of October we were marched to the Manila Piers and boarded the small freighter, nicknamed the Benjo Maru.   This six weeks voyage was the worst time of my life.   They came down the vertical ladder until we were standing shoulder to shoulder and the hatch was closed.   It was liken to a crowded elevator and when we sat down we drew up our knees and lounged against one another.   There was no place at all to stretch out.   The floor was filthy having been used to transport horses and coal.   There was no ship ventilation and no port holes so the heat was enormous.   The hatch cover was timber with small spaces between them.   The bathroom was a round wooden tub lowered by cable and placed directly under the hatch.   I was glad that my position was one person away from the bulkhead and not near the commode.   There were two meals of rice served daily, each was a very small portion, and there was no soup or other food.   The real serious problem here was lack of sufficient water.   We got no more than a canteen cup full each day, not nearly enough with the heat we endured and none to wash our mess kit.   Some tried to catch rainwater as it drained from the sides of the dirty hatch.   I could hear the booming sounds at the Americans attacked the convoy many, many times.   The hatch was covered and secured by cable during each attack and we knew that we would go down with the ship if it were sunk.   It sure was a helpless feeling.   There were many deaths but none in my vicinity.   The ship kept under way for three or four weeks when it dropped anchor.   The word from topside, where there were American cooks and the worst cases of the sick, was that we were in Hong Kong Harbor.   We remained anchored there about 10 days.   I was permitted to go on deck one time, the only time that I was out of the filthy, crowded hold.   I remember the climb up the vertical ladder with 1/2-inch steel rungs.   I was bare-footed and due to my weakened condition it was a difficult climb.   The weather had cooled by this time as we were farther north.   The breath of cool, fresh air was pleasant to say the least.   The latrine there was a platform attached to the outside of the ship rail floored with boards with spaces between them to squat upon.   Then we were under way again to dock in Takao, Formosa.

    Four men joined our group in Formosa that were of 9 survivors from the Arisan Maru that sailed from Manila 8 days after we did.   I was acquainted with two of the four at the Kobe work detail.   Five of those survivors were picked up by friendly Chinese and I talked with one of them at a Fontana Village reunion.   He said they were home by Christmas 1944.

    We had air attacks at Takao Harbor before we docked.   We disembarked after 39 days.   This was my idea of a true slave ship.   I cannot begin to describe my feelings to get off that ship even though it was on enemy territory.

    POW CAMP ON FORMOSA
    I bruised my back as we arrived at this camp and could not work for a couple of weeks, then I was assigned light duty to clean the latrines.   This required two people.   We emptied the latrines into a wooden tub with a long handled bamboo dipper.   We then carried this tub, by means of a pole on our shoulders, to the vegetable garden and spread it on the cool weather vegetables.   The camp was large enough that this was a steady job for us the remainder of out stay there.   The food improved and we did not receive the abuse that we experienced in the Philippines.   We could hear the air raids on nearby targets and sometimes see the planes but they never attacked our camp.   The stay here was perhaps a little more than 2 months then it was to the port again for another voyage that I really feared considering our previous trip.   I do not have even a nickname for this ship.   It was real luxury compared to the previous voyage.   We were even permitted entertainment.   I can still see and hear the POW who sang Judy Garland's "Some where over the rainbow Bluebirds fly, why oh why can't I"?.   We had a place that we could stretch out without touching anyone!   It was a double deck sleeping with maybe 4 feet between the decks.   We entered the area via stairway.   Of course, the Benjo tub for a latrine was the same, only larger.   If there was a hatch overhead it was covered.   Someone discovered a way to get to the cargo hold below and found brown sugar and dried fruit.   What a treat!   I really had a feast, I never heard if anyone was ever caught.   I was alone down below stealing sugar when there was sounds of explosions and I got out of there fast...perhaps I feared dying alone.   We were under way about three weeks.   The weather was much colder when we docked.   The word was that we were in Moji, Japan.   It was early February and the coldest day that I had seen since St. Louis, MO a long four years ago.   We assembled on an open area by the dock.   There was a brisk wind and fine rain with a little sleet.   We did not have clothing for that kind of weather and had been in hot climate for years, but we remained there all day.   They took a rectal smear with a glass tube and that made us even colder.   Finally we boarded a ferry for the short trip across the channel to the island of Honshu where we boarded passenger cars with seats and a restroom (overflowing).   The trip was several hours long to the Kobe, Japan.   We marched to our new home, a former schoolhouse, my eighth Prison Camp.

    KOBE, JAPAN
    We were given cold weather clothing, canvas shoes with the separate pocket for the big toe, blankets and a two-inch thick fiber mat to sleep on.   The rooms had a two-foot high platform so where we slept side by side.   That arrangement came in handy because two could share blankets and stay warmer.   The building had no heat.   The primary work here was on the docks unloading and screening coal and coke by hand.   We learned a new way to unload a barge, you had a four foot long pole across one shoulder with a basket attached to each end with ropes about three feet long.   Sometimes the lift from the barge unto the dock was 8 feet, so when the baskets were loaded and you walked up an incline on a foot wide board with cleats.   To dump the load you gave a yank on the basket ropes and the baskets dumped with the shoulder board coming down and hitting your heels. I worked on that job three months or more.   I caught other day jobs to the railroad yards, unloading rail cars of bags of rice, also rail cars of coal.   Once I was on top of a carload of coal and the load was dumped with me walking on top.   I went down with the coal about 30 feet and cut a gash on my cheekbone that needed sewing.   A guard took me a few blocks to a clinic and a doctor did a good job.   The doctor was a Caucasian man that spoke fluent English.   He was a German citizen.   The body lice (graybacks) were a real problem; they irritated the skin with bites and itching.   Sometimes we could boil the flannel shirts while we were at work and that helped.  They could be picked off as they lived in the seams of our clothing; of course we could never get rid of them or of their eggs.   I enjoyed one good bath that winter in a hot tub that was in the back corner of the school compound.   The water was hot and I could stay long enough to soak...it was heavenly.

    The rice diet changed.   It was about half rice and half barley and very hard to digest.   We began to receive Red Cross food packages that were a lifesaver.   During the march to work we sometimes received objects thrown at us in anger, we were very much the enemy with the constant bombing that Japan was receiving at the time.   It was during one of these marches that I remember hearing that President Roosevelt was dead.   This was in mid April 1945.   Soon the bombers came to Kobe and there was much burning but none with us were injured.   The railroad station where I had worked was damaged.   There were many air raids during the three months here before we moved out to work on a lake.

    MAIBARA, JAPAN
    The small city was located on the East Side of Lake Biwa, about 40 miles north of Kyoto, Japan.   It was a small compound of about four long barracks with a wooden wall enclosing it nestled at the bottom of a very steep hill with view of a railroad track and rice lands.   It was a short walk to work and we walked single file part of the way through rice paddies.   It looked like the project was to reclaim part of the lake for farming.   We worked in mud and water, loaded dirt and mud into cars on tracks and then dumped.   We used shovels and a sling made of straw or reeds to load the very wet mud.   I had other days working in the rice fields setting out seedlings.   They were set out in rows with water about five inches deep.   It was back breaking work.

    Guards were not a brutal here and there was no beating in camp, some of the guards were older men, and perhaps that accounted for it.   Food here was pure rice with no barley but not a lot of it.   We were permitted to gather clams from the lake bottom during our lunch break.   We boiled them in a can and they were a treat even with no salt.

    We watched the American B-29 bombers fly over daily, once over 100 in a single day.   They never attacked our area.   We just knew that freedom was to be soon.   We were in the barracks before work one day and I heard a plane, looked out the open window and saw a fighter plane coming down the hill with his tracer fire blazing right at our compound.   The target was a train near the camp.   We did not go to work that day or any day after.   It was on August 15, l945.   This was my ninth Prison Camp and freedom was so close that we could smell it! Then in a few days we got a good close look at the large American bombers as they flew very low and made an air drop of food and clothing.   What a glorious sight!   The very best day of my live I do believe.   There was everything...sweets, canned fruit, canned meat and stuff that I had never seen like a large can of cooked bacon, clothing, just everything.   None of us were injured in the airdrop but some were in other camps.   The guard force was no longer around but the Jap commander remained with a few soldiers.   We were no longer under guard.   He had told us the war was over and that arrangements were being made for our move to a port.

    We remained at this camp for three weeks eating, resting and waiting transport.   The first Americans I saw were a man and woman in civilian clothing that came to camp.   They had been to see the destruction of one of the cities (I can't remember which) by a bomb they called "Atom Bomb", of course we just could not grasp what they saying.   During this time a friend and I boarded a train to another city a couple hours from Maibara just for the ride and to look around.   I never did know which city.   Some of our guys went to the train station and walked through the cars and, believe it or not, came out with Japanese Officer's swords.   I was not with them so I don't know the circumstances.   American soldiers came to make arrangements and accompany us to Yokohama.   We did not recognize their uniforms, as the helmets and clothing were like none that we knew.   We arrived in Yokohama on Sep. 10, l945 to be de-loused, given uniforms and loaded onto a ship.   We had a meal fit for a king and assigned a bunk.   I was at last FREE...freed from hard labor, starvation, guards with guns, barbed wire, brutal treatment, yes free to live again.   My freedom, my life, was paid for with the blood of those killed and wounded in the Pacific Campaign.   "Freedom is not Free".

    In the harbor were more warships that you could count.   I later learned that my brother Wilburn arrived in Yokohama as part of the US. Army Occupation Force the very next day after I left.

    MY POW DIARY
    Covers last seven months as a POW of the Japanese


    GOING HOME
    We were in route about 10 days to arrive at (where else?)- Manila, P.I. for processing.   I met other members of my battery here and heard of the massacre of the POWs at Palawan Island on Dec. 14, 1944 when all of the POWs were driven into a covered trench, set afire with gasoline, then shot those that ran out.   Eleven men escaped and lived to tell of it.   There is a mass grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, St. Louis where 123 of those men were buried on Feb. 14, 1952.   My brothers Nelson, Wilburn, and I visited this gravesite in 1980.

    Soon we loaded onto a ship to arrive in San Francisco on Oct. 15, l945.   As the ship tied up I could see that it was not exactly a grand welcome home.   There were not over a dozen people on the wharf and a band of only three instruments.   The bus trip was short to Letterman General Hospital where we had medical check-up.   Soon we boarded a hospital train, in pajamas, for the trip to the Brookes General Hospital at San Antonio, TX.   I could not help but compare our treatment as POWs to those that served us food at the hospital.   They wore clean clothing with POW printed of their back.   We were thankful that none looked Japanese.   Working with good food as Prisoners of War and serving GIs!   Soon I was released on furlough and got a train home to Paragould, AR.   The first relative that I saw was my sister-in-law in Lafe, AR.   Of course she did not recognize me, as I had been away so long.   My brother Leslie drove me home to my parents for a joyous reunion.   I was home again, after five years!


    My Prisoner of War days began 59 years ago.

                    

      Pvt. Ralph Walden                     Ralph & Edie Walden
      Ft. McDowell, CA                          Married 53 years