The last lap of their long and tortured journey was about to begin for the dirty, wounded, sick American skeletons who had left Manila for prison camps in Japan.

They had suffered almost to the limit of endurance but their tale of horror had not yet been spun out. Many were dead -- some from bombs dropped by other Americans who had no way of knowing. The others were dead from the brutalities of the Japs, who knew and admitted they did not care.

Between 800 and 900 men were now alive of the 1600 plus who had marched out of Bilibid prison in Manila precisely a month before. Many of them, however, wounded and untended, were at the very gate of death. To move them was to doom them. But the Japanese wanted them moved, and not slowly.

There were intestinal hemorrhages, extreme shocks, amputations; how could such men be moved? Corpsmen figured out a bos’n’s chair to get them out of the hold. They put a Spanish bowline around each leg and a square knot around the waist to steady the torso, and up went the groaning man, hauled by 16 of the pairs of hands still able to tug.

When it came to moving the men who could not be held upright, the corpsmen took a plank, fixed a scaffold knot around each end, and slowly tugged him through the hatch.

"In a way this was the most terrible job of a1l," says one officer. "For the first time we had to cause pain to ourselves, and we could not avoid it. What I remember most clearly was the smile on Mr. Wada’s face as he watched us." Mr. Wada was the Jap interpreter.

When they reached the new ship another obstacle awaited the wounded. On the side where the accommodation ladder had been lowered there were already a couple of barges tied up, whose decks had to he crossed with each wounded man before the ladder was reached.

The ups and downs of this slow trip brought many of the worst wounded into coma.

"I’ll never forget," says one officer, "seeing Captain Walter Donaldson, a 200^th Coast Artillery officer from Deming, N.M. He could not walk, but he could crawl, and he crawled the whole way.

"He had two sprained wrists and two fractured ankles, but he could still creep on his elbows and knees. He crawled all the way around the barges, up the ladder and onto the deck."

Approximately 14 men who reached the new ship never saw its hold. They died on its decks. But they were not taken ashore to be cremated, they waited, like the others, to make at least a start on the journey toward Japan. Dead in port, they were to be buried at sea.

No Room to Stand

On the new ship, an undersized freighter, the shrinking party was again forced all into a single hold. The bays or shelves here were divided stanchion by stanchion and were about 15 feet long by about 10 feet deep. Each bay accommodated about 20 men, counted off by Lieutenant Colonel Johnson.

Two positions were possible: to sit with legs extended, or to lie down with knees drawn up. Standing or lying down at full length was impossible.

Rapidly though the party diminished, the Japanese always managed to see that their pits were smaller than normal for their numbers. The hold was the next to the last aft.

After sundown January 13 the ship slipped out of Takao. But her course did not turn toward Japan, but China.

By now it was apparent that only the strongest would endure and live. The little food was carefully rationed, but not equally. The medical corpsmen, who were doing most of the physical work, got more by common consent. And the details which carried the slop buckets on the decks had opportunities for trading not given to those lying below decks.

The death rate took a wild jump upward. George L. Curtis says: "I counted 47 dead in all on the first day out." By now the Japanese also were calling the roll, standing like little gods at the edge of the hatch against the skyline for as long as two hours at a time and monotonously droning forth the names of the Americans. When one did not answer, they did not ask any questions. Mr. Wada simply drew a line through his name.

Less and less began to be seen of Lieutenant Toshino, the officer in charge. He may have been slightly apprehensive that his superiors would not be fully happy over his stewardship. After all, though, over half the Americans were still alive.

It immediately grew colder. A few straw mats were in the hold, but only enough for about one-third of the men. Friends tried to huddle together under a single dry mat, while the cold wind swept under them.

From the first day a bitter draft began to suck through the hold. It came from the ventilator in the Japanese quarters just astern, sucked through the stern hays on the starboard side of the prisoners’ pit, swept across the opening in the middle and up through the hatch. On this wind of death the lives of many Americans rode their way out.

More than once Lieutenant Colonel (now Colonel) Curtis Beecher pleaded with the Japanese to allow prisoners to stuff one of their straw mats in the ventilator. The Japanese always refused. And so the wind of death brought pneumonia, a new visitor.

The hatch in the center of the hold, covered with tarpaulin, led to the deck below and was never opened. It lay there bare to the sky, with the cold draft sweeping and swirling over it. The rain and later snow and hail fell through it, fell on the bodies of those who lay exposed on the hatch.

The dying on the hatch were also looked on covetously by the shivering men in the bays, who were already mentally dividing up their clothes. A medical Committee for clothing -- itself grotesquely naked, a kind of skinny parody of such social committees at home -- was supposed to handle the equitable division of clothes. But men died at night, and the committee members could not always get to their feet, and there was connivance.

A few life preservers, the kapok-stuffed vest kind, torn and dirty, overlooked by the Japanese in their final search of the hold, lay in the far corners of the bays.

Immediately the prisoners tore these open and pulled out the wadding. They parceled out the kapok. The few rolls of it were stuffed into the few pants that still had full legs and the few shirts that still had arms.

"The luckiest ones walked around looking like fat Teddy bears," says one survivor. "But they never stopped scratching. The kapok was a hive of lice, and the lice never gave them any peace to enjoy their warmth."

TOMORROW: WEDDING RINGS FOR WATER