Oral History Program Charles Mayberry Interviewed by Robert Tesch 06 September 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Charles Mayberry Interviewed by Robert Tesch 06 September 1971 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Mayberry, Charles, an oral history by Robert Tesch, 06 September 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Charles Mayberry. The interview was conducted on September 6th, 1971, by Robert Tesch, at 3000 3rd East, Salt Lake City, Utah. Mr. Mayberry discusses his personal experiences as a Prisoner of War during World War II. RT: Mr. Mayberry, could you start out by telling me a little bit about how you got involved in WWII? CM: It was during the Depression, or we were just coming out of a Depression, and work was very scarce here, in Utah. I was living in Ogden at the time, and I had an opportunity to go to Wake Island to a (take?) five contractors, and as I said, work was real scarce now. I had a family to keep and I thought it advisable to go, so in January, I left Ogden and went down to San Francisco, and when I got down there I found out that the departure of the boat had been postponed for two weeks, so I had to come back home and go back down again. So I got down there approximately the first part of February and we sailed for Honolulu. While in Honolulu, I was... we were in port there until we ship got ready to leave for Wake Island. Approximately two weeks there. They had to make up a barge and there was quite a lot of preparations. Finally we were about another week or ten days going from the port in Honolulu to Wake Island. During that time of course, about the day after... out of Honolulu, they had a black out on the boat every night and it just made it a little inconvenient although it was a fairly pleasant trip otherwise. After arriving on Wake Island, we had to remain on the ship for... which was the S.S. Burrows, for two nights as the tents we were supposed to sleep in were in the bottom of the hold of the ship. After we finally got off the ship we of course lived in these 1 tents while we erected some barracks, and as I remember we two or three months building these barracks. In fact we only built a part of them at the time and then later on if they moved more workers in there and also service men, why they added some more. But they were starting to build defense. I was there about six months when we had a typhoon on the Island as I remember it was about in September and it was quite bad typhoon that hit. It started one evening and continued during part of the night, which was very frightening. I almost had a notion to catch the next boat back. After a while we soon forgot about it and as we were starting to get a bonus then, a pretty good size bonus, why that was pretty tempting to stay there for at least a year. But they had reduced the time to nine months, so at the time that Pearl Harbor was attacked, the S.S. Burrows was on its way out there about approximately three days, two or three days from the island. The Skipper immediately changed his mind and cut the barge loose, and headed back for Honolulu. He made it of course but there the morning of the seventh of December, of 1941 we got reported of Pearl Harbor being attacked. There wasn't too much attention paid to it. The Foreman’s had us go right on working. I was working in carpentry work in the carpenter shop at the time. We were advised to keep on working. In about eleven forty-five, that morning it was slightly cloudy, we heard a number of planes overhead but we didn't pay much attention to them as there had been a number of planes before periodically. Some about every three or four days or a week in and out to Australia, and they would land in the hills so we didn't think too much about it. But we didn't have long to wait because they started dropping bombs on the airport and straffing the airplanes that were stationed there, the fighter planes and the pilots of course made haste to get in their planes and get in the air before the... (Attire?) or as 2 soon as they heard the planes coming evidently they must have known or got word or something that it was too late because most of them were killed in their planes and the only planes that were saved were the two on the ground left out of eight, and one was quite badly damaged, and the two planes which were up in the air reconnaissance planes which had been in an opposite direction and had not observed the coming in of this fight of Japanese Bombers. Well as soon as we heard the airport bombed we naturally run out of the shop and looked up and saw these planes and we knew instantly what it meant then and we headed for the barracks but they had swung and dropped their bombs on the other installation there. The Hotel and a Pan-Arab plane that had returned from Guam was setting in the harbor and they straffed it some but didn't damage it very much, but they destroyed the hotel and some of the other installations, on Hilo Island I believe. So we dashed for the brush they machine gunned us... at us as we were running towards the brush but luckily none of us got hit. That was only the beginning. About the same time each day there would be a squadron of planes return and straff and bomb the islands. This went on for about two weeks with only one or two days I believe that they failed to show up. During that time, of course, we were living mostly in air... Crude air shelters that eventually we'd constructed out of the barracks. We felt fairly secure there as we figured because they couldn't see us. A number of the (impairs?) as well as the service men would go out at night and move the anti-aircraft guns to… as we knew that they took pictures of them as they came over each day and by moving them they wouldn't be able to hit them, which they didn't for a long time. RT: How many guns did you have there? Did you (_____) the defense? 3 CM: I think there was only two. No, I didn't, I wasn't in the defense. But they had some shore batteries, that they were successful in sinking a number of Japanese vessels. After the... about the start of the second week this task force pulled in close... they'd figured they'd silenced all the guns and they thought all they'd have to do was come there and take over but to their dismay they found out there was a few there to greet them and although the gunners didn't have any rangefinders on these they waited until a ship got up close enough, which I think there were about seven in the first flotilla that arrived, and they pointed over the ends of the barrel, and I think they sank about three or four out of the seven and one or two escaped but the aviators that still had these two planes in operation, they flew out and dropped bombs on a carrier and destroyed it and I think they got one submarine and I guess that was about the extent... I think there was only one or two out of the bunch that escaped and they paid very dearly for that, which was probably a good thing because they waited again for another week or almost a week before they returned with about several hundred ships. I don't know just how many but they had the island well surrounded, and I think they'd have stood back and blew us off the map. They came in with a couple of small vessels they might have been shore vessels of some type and barged them on the beaches and came off of there and these ships were set on fire by gunfire I think both of them. I don't know whether they were burned completely up or not but anyhow they were destroyed. RT: You said that they were filled with Japanese soldiers. CM: Yes, they were filled with soldiers that came on the island, and, of course they flew over with planes and loudspeakers and they told us to come out of the brush with our hands up and of course we did. They marched us over to a big place that had been bulldozed 4 out for our hospital. It was a big... about forty or fifty... forty or sixty feet long and about thirty feet wide and they made us strip off our clothes and enter this hole that was sloping down so we wouldn't have any trouble getting in there, and we figured that was the end of us and we figured that they would just drop a couple of bombs in there and then bulldozed us right in, bury us right under there. But they didn't. They kept us there for an hour or so and then they told us to come out. Of course, our clothes were all mixed up and some of the fellows were unable to find their own clothes and some didn't have hardly any, even a pair of pants and they marched us over to the airport and kept us out there in the airport for I think it was three days and it was at the time of Christmas. They had some machine guns set up and... After the first night some of us were allowed to come in the hangars there was one or two hangers, airplane hangars that hadn't been destroyed, and we were able to get in out of the cold as it was getting pretty cold out nights there then. RT: How much food did they give you during those three days? CM: Very little food. The water that we got... it was… had been put in gasoline cans by the American GI's during the bombing of the island and it tasted very much of gasoline and it was terrible to drink. There was very little food. We got a little bit twice a day as I remember. They let us go... took us into the barracks and we had our accommodations as they hadn't bombed each barracks. Not all of them made it, some of them were destroyed but there was enough left. We didn't have too bad accommodations until we... until they got ready to take us off the island, which was about the first of the year or a little bit after. The first part of January as I remember. The boat that they brought in to remove us from the island was one of the S.S. Needa Maru ships. It was a self-liner. 5 Two out of the three that they'd built us as I remember were in San Francisco. The United States had apprehended them there so that this one ship was the only one out of the three that they had left, and this was... these three ships were about the fastest ships in the world which served a good purpose for us because during our trip to Yokohama from Wake Island we were... we encountered an American sub and were chased by it for some distance in fact this ship even had an airplane on it, a reconnaissance plane that would fly out and try to observe if they saw any American subs and being a fast ship, it run away from this submarine, and we were able to arrive there safely. RT: How did the Japanese get a hold of this Needa Maru bit, eventually? CM: The other two that were in the harbor, I don't really know. I guess... I suppose that they got them back but I never did hear. They kept us in Yokohama for I think it was three or four days. They didn't seem to know what they were going to do with us. Then finally they decided to take us to China, and we were two or three days going from there to Shanghai where we just disembarked and... There were three or four fellows that were connected, the servicemen that were connected with radio. I think they had some radar then and they took them off the ship there at Shanghai and we never heard any more about them. One fellow gave me his dog tag to bring home to notify his parents if I got out of it. Then they marched us off of this ship and we'd been down in the hold of this ship for about two weeks, and we were stiffened up and we had a hard time to walk because we were in cramped positions down there for such a long period of time that some of the fellows couldn’t even walk from there out to the barracks that when... time was where we were stationed. When we got out there we saw some old Chinese 6 barracks that were in a very dilapidated condition that we went to work and fixed them up to where we were fairly comfortable except for the cold weather. Contrary to a lot of people's idea about Shanghai it gets real cold there, they don't have snow but the temperature goes down. In fact that first winter I think it got as low as about 15 or 20 above and at that climate, it's pretty cold when it gets that cold. During that winter, we didn't have any fires, we didn't have very many blankets. In fact we had to sleep in our clothing. We had I think it was two or three Japanese blankets they had issued to us which were made out of fiber. There wasn't much warmth to them, and we had straw ticks to sleep on, on our bunks and we spent the winter there. We didn't have to work but it was almost as bad as work trying to keep warm. When spring came however, there was quite a bit of bare ground around the barracks and we were allowed to go out and plant a garden out there and most of the able bodied men worked in this garden a few hours a day and I happened to be a barber by trade along with two or three others and we were assigned to a makeshift barber shop there. And we did the barbering for the camp. The shaving as well as the haircutting. By the time that we had gotten over there and got settled down why, most of the fellows had beards and long hair to the extent that you couldn't hardly recognize your own friends, but after we all got clipped up, why, it changed our appearance so much that we didn't know each other then, so we thought it was quite laughable. We managed to keep the fellows hair cut down in the camp. Every so often they'd bring a number of either aviators in, maybe two or three aviators or several men from some merchant marine ship that had been sunk or vessel of some type or other, and every year they'd send a bunch over to Japan out of the camp. There were also a number of North China Marines that came in about two weeks 7 after we were there, that were captured up in Peking, and that added to the number of them and then one or two of the Italian vessels that had been sank and they also brought them in to our camp. RT: Well what were conditions like living in the camp? CM: Well, the conditions were pretty bad that first year, but by the next year we had built a bakery and... enabling us to get bread, although they had been bringing bread in to us for some time then before the bakery was built but they hauled the bread in open trucks and just like you would coal or grading or something so it wasn't too clean but we weren't fussing either as we were getting pretty tired of rice by then so we welcomed all the bread that we could get. And once in a while, about every week or two weeks they'd bring beef in for the whole camp. You were lucky if you got two or three pieces of beef once a day. We usually got fed twice a day and sometimes three times. We'd get something at noon, especially when we were working. After the second year of course they moved us over to another camp, or rather that fall they did, and we started to work building a rifle range. This was quite a project. In fact this lasted almost two years building it. We had to walk quite a distance. It was probably four miles, four-five miles, where we built it. RT: Did you have to get up early in the morning and walk that far and they come back in the evening. CM: Yes. We worked five days a week. They let us have Saturdays and Sundays off to do our washing, and whatever we wanted to do we did. Most of us did quite a lot of reading. We had a goodly supply of books that had been sent in from Shanghai. 8 RT: So they treated you pretty good the second year? CM: Yes, we were treated much better the second year. RT: And most of the facilities that were built like you said the Barber shop, and you built a bakery...? CM: Well, the bakery... the barber shop were just partitioned off in the barracks, just a small room. RT: I imagine it was quite surprising to you that they gave you that much freedom, wasn't it? CM: Well, that's right. We fared a lot better than they did in most of the camps because this camp... particular camp was a camp that they came and took pictures. They had a magazine... they published a magazine they called the freedom magazine, and they would take pictures of the camp and some of the fellows that were dressed up and sometimes they would bring some... one time they brought in, I think it was, three loads of beef and took pictures of it and then they took two of them away. RT: So that… you were sort of the scapegoats and propaganda that... CM: Yes that's right. It was propaganda camp; that was the main purpose of it. That’s the reason why we were treated somewhat better and sometimes they'd have meetings with some of the fellows there and of course we didn't dare say anything derogatory anyway. RT: Did you have... I heard that there was one camp, one prison camp that where they had... where the prisoners were engaged in ship building, but I understand that was quite a terrible place and there had been a lot of people die from exhaustion and malnutrition and all kinds of things like this? 9 CM: No, I didn't hear about that but I read a book by a fellow by the name of John Burton that was over there. I didn't… I knew him just casually but I didn't know him personally but he was from out near Granger and he wrote this book called 'Walk a Crooked Mile” I believe, I can't remember for sure. I read the book but he was one of the first to go to Japan from Wake Island in one of the first groups. The things that he told about were just terrible. He was a plumber and they made him all kinds of promises how they'd put in real nice quarters and they'd be fed good and everything was just the reverse. RT: So from the... How many people were at Wake Island would you say, all told? CM: There was around 1500 on the Island to start with and… RT: And they split you up into groups, so many to each camp, is that it? CM: Well, the majority of us went to China. In fact all but about 120 what they kept on the Island, approximately 120. Then from China, every year they'd send a group over to Japan, send a bunch, two-three hundred, something like that out of the camp so it had dwindled down to probably about three… about 1100 by the time we broke up camp and they moved us over to... RT: And then they moved all of you over to Japan? CM: Yes. They moved all of us over except just a few that were too sick to be moved or there were some in the Shanghai prison that had tried to escape. RT: Did you ever find out what happened to these people? CM: They finally got out at the end of the war. They were treated actually better than we were. Most of them were officers however. 10 RT: What were conditions like when they sent you to this other prisoner of war camp in Japan? CM: Well that was a much worse camp then we were in in China. Of course we weren't there very long but fleas were simply terrible there. They just about drove you crazy. It was full of them it seemed tike. It was an old deserted camp that had been used for Japanese soldiers. It wasn't in too bad a condition but, like I say, the fleas were just terrible. I guess they were all over Japan but there they probably thrived for a long time before we came in. We were moved up to North China first. We stayed in North China for about a month and then we a moved over to Korea. I was at Pusan. They kept us there for about five days and they deloused us and one thing or another. RT: Deloused you. What was that? CM: Well they put us through a tank that they sprayed us, you know, and someone sprayed their clothes. It as far as lice or bedbugs or fleas over in China, we weren't bothered too much, you know, the camp was fairly free of them. Mosquitos were pretty bad during the summer but they gave us mosquito nets so they were pretty well controlled. The suffering was during the winter. There they allowed us to build fires only in the evening and we just had some small funnel shaped stoves that wouldn't hold very much and then all we had to burn was coal dust. We made it into coal balls, mixed clay with it and dried it out and it burned pretty fair after you got it started. Sometimes it was pretty hard getting it started when you didn't have much wood to start it with. RT: It was still pretty cold though? 11 CM: Yes, it was still pretty cold. You weren't comfortable unless you were right by the heater. They only allowed two heaters in a barracks. Some of the fellows weren't very close to them. RT: Tell me about what happened after you left China, and some of the things you went through then. CM: Well when we got over in Japan, we slept in the school house, on a bare floor the first night, and then they boarded us on the train the next day and they brought us down in the coast a lot farther than they had intended to on account of the submarines. I don't know whether they were actually chased by a submarine or whether it was because of the danger there because at that stage of the war there were American submarines operating in the China Sea there, and I don’t think there's any doubt but what they were fairly close because of the changing of the destinations, that took us quite a lot farther down the coast than what they had anticipated. And then as I say, after we left the schoolhouse they put us on a train, a passenger train and they put six of us in each compartment and two had to sleep underneath the seats and that was really terrible because... on account of the fleas there. And they pulled the blinds down on the train so we could see out of the trains going through Tokyo, especially we tried to look out but the guards watched us very closely because most of it had been bombed out by then and they didn't want us to see that. RT: This is when Tokyo had been bombed real bad? CM: Yes, this was just two or three months before the end of the war. We were in Japan about two months, two and a half months is all. So Tokyo was in pretty bad shape then, they took us over to Niikade where we were stationed in these Japanese barracks and 12 there we had to walk down to the harbor which was about five or six miles as I remember, each day and work unloading cars and ships. Most of the things that we unloaded as I remember were...off of the cars, were these salt and soybean cakes, and of course there were other things too, but that was the principal thing that we did while we there was unload these ships as they came in and we saw quite bit of action there. The Americans came over and bombed the harbor there two or three times they laid mines in the harbor every... oh, two or three times a week. The B-29'S would fly over at different levels about three to five or six planes at a time. Sometimes they'd hit the land, usually they'd land in the bay there in the mouth of the river and we saw them bombed occasionally once or twice. Also we saw some of these, some of the ships hit mines, I think we saw two of them, there was one barge, there was one dredge that was out in... Not too far from where we was working that was set upside down by a mine that went off. There was one ship that been damaged that they brought in they put a lot of antiaircraft guns on it and ammunition and finally some of our airplanes came in and they bombed it out, they set it on fire and the ammunition battrie I don't know what they call them, exploded all during one afternoon they'd go off every few minutes around three or four times a minute and then we'd wait. If the fire crept into the holes in the ship where the ammunitions were stationed why they'd go off again. They had two or three firefighting boats there but they weren't able to control the fire and the whole top of the ship was burned off. RT: This was just before the end of the war, is that right? CM: Not too long before, it was about a month or six weeks. 13 RT: Did you ever witness when you were working under these conditions, where the guards would beat up anybody intentionally for what he did or…? CM: No, not too much. The only time that I ever got into trouble was the night on the fire watch, we had to stand the fire watch every so often and the fellow that was... there was two fellows that would stand the fire watch, on shift, and the fellow that was supposed to wake us up forgot to get up or didn't get up and wake us up and the guard came in slapped us and took us out to the guard house and worked us over a little that was the only time I ever got touched, all the while I was over there. It wasn't actually our fault, we tried to explain but we couldn't make him understand and so we just had to take the rap. RT: So what else happened just before the end of the war? You said you were loading ships and unloading ships and so on. CM: Well, that’s about all that happened except when they flew and dropped leaflets telling the Japanese about the atomic bomb. Well it had already dropped the bomb on Niigata and Nagasaki then... RT: Hiroshima! CM: Hiroshima. RT: They dropped it first on Hiroshima and then… CM: Yes, Hiroshima and then... Nagasaki, right. They had dropped the second bomb, I think, when they told them the Islands were surrounded and they'd better give up or they'd drop some more, as they had some more ready. We found out afterwards that the place we were at this was the prime target for the atomic bomb, because they'd moved the 14 population up in the mountains and they was twin cities there and they were practically ghost cities. RT: Was the place you lived at the sighting of the second bomb, right? The place they should have dropped the... CM: Well, that was actually the primary target, but due to weather conditions they’d taken these secondary targets. That's how close we came to getting it. RT: Where exactly was this? CM: Niigata is in the north coast of the island of Honshu. RT: I'll bet you that made you sit bacs and think after the war was over. CM: Yes, It certainly did. I heard it from two sources, I'm pretty sure it was accurate. They dropped some ship news of this ship they'd been flying supplies to us from. They dropped us copies of the ship news and it mentioned it on there and then coming home, why, I had the privilege of talking to an officer, one of them that had been in the crew that had dropped the atomic bomb and he told us the same thing. So that's how close I came to getting it. RT: How did the Japanese take the dropping of the leaflets and so on? Did you ever find out...? CM: I don't really know, although they tried to get them all, they didn't want us to pick any of them up at all, but of course naturally there wasn't enough guards to watch everybody so there were some of them picked up, left them in the camp, and when we got off to work, we marched to work and we just stayed there a little while and then they told us to go back to the barracks. So that's the last we worked. After we got back to the barracks, 15 why, the next day I believe it was the next day they started dropping food in and we heard that they were negotiating for peace. RT: Yes the Americans dropped you in supplies and so forth... CM: Yes, they dropped the supplies in to us. RT: Did they Japanese get any of those supplies and take them or did you get them all? CM: No, we got them all. Practically all that we wanted. They dropped them off in the camp most of the time. They dropped them on parachutes, and sometimes the parachutes would get tangled up and big drums would come down and break open and scatter the canned stuff all over or whatever it was. We'd let the Japanese get that because most of it would get dirty or spoiled, you know, and they'd clean everything right up, paper and all there wasn't a thing that they'd leave. They even hit the barracks with some of these boxes of shoes and different things that they dropped, so we got so we didn't even stay around there when the time came for them to fly over. Of course it wasn't always the same at that time but, we'd get... most of us would get right away from there because it was a little dangerous. RT: I see. Is there anything else that you can think of that sort of stands out in your mind? CM: One woman behind our camp got hit with a gallon can of peaches in the head and it killed her. Even a package of cigarettes falling that far. There was one of the fellows in the camp the first day was out there and he'd been frightened to death anyway, of the mines and bombs and the shrapnel, and he'd run out in the air shelter and a box of... a carton of cigarettes came down and hit him behind the head and put a little lump there and I guess that hurt too, falling that far. 16 RT: Now, I've heard other people say that there were a number of men killed because their parachutes didn't hold up. CM: We had a camp (_____) but we heard about a number of them killed. RT: So did the Japanese give you pretty much the run of the place after they started dropping these things? CM: Yes, they... most of the guards disappeared. RT: They just simply... they just left probably a dozen there? CM: Just a few main officers, and they didn't bother us. They'd kowtow to us and everything, we didn't see any more guards really after, maybe one or two. RT: How long was it after they dropped the supplies that you had actually saw a fellow American? What I mean is soldiers... CM: You mean before they took us out? We were there about ten days I guess, to two weeks. I guess eight or ten days. RT: And then the troops came in and started moving you out? CM: No, they loaded us on the trains and took us to Yokohama. We didn't see any troops, that's that first we saw of the American troops when we got there to Yokohama base. RT: They loaded you on American ships then? CM: They flew most of the fellows out. There was a few of us that missed the plane that first day and they took us by boat. We went to a different destination. They took us to Guam. They took the other fellows to Okinawa, and they flew from there to Manila, and they 17 came by boat, from Manila home so we actually got home before they did. We went by boat all the way. RT: I guess you can't describe the feeling on the boat can you as far as the attitude… Or on the airplane… as you were going home? CM: Oh, it was wonderful. It was like being in heaven almost. That journey home didn't bug us at all. We was all subdued with the thought of getting out of there and getting away from the orient. RT: How long did you stay in that camp in Japan? CM: We were in there from about… approximately… RT: It really wasn't too long? Compared to the place... the P-O-W camp in China for what, two years? CM: No, we were there over three. Forty-four months and thirteen days all told before the time I got home. RT: I guess when you think of the end of the war you realize that the Japanese had surrendered, the feeling... how you felt was probably overwhelming. CM: Oh, It was! RT: Can you think of anything else in your experiences as a prisoner of war that would kind of stand out? What... did you find a lot of men that died of malnutrition and diarrhea and so on and…? CM: There were a few. Not too many. RT: But the overall condition then, wasn't too bad. 18 CM: No, nothing to compare with what it was in some of the other camps or on the Philippine Islands. We were stationed there in Niigata about a mile or so from another camp that had mostly fellows from… they were Canadians some of them and Americans too. That came out off of the Philippine Islands. They told us some awful horrible things that happened there. RT: So did you feel you were pretty lucky? CM: I think I was real fortunate in not going to Japan any sooner than I did. In fact we all had a horror of going to Japan, and it was only through the hand of God I think that I got spared going over there. I was on the list to go to Japan with the last bunch that went, not the very last, but the one before the last, the year before they broke up the camp. RT: You mentioned that periodically they would take prisoners of war and take them to Japan. Is that just the individuals that sort of specialized in broadcasting? Did it seem to indicate that the Japanese... CM: No! It was all, it was all tradesmen. RT: Did they take the men that you had and put them to work at whatever trade they had? CM: That's right. But the conditions were so much worse there that they had to work longer, much longer hours and we only got two days off a month in Japan, whereas over in China, we got off every weekend. So it was... of course we didn't hear any news of the salvaged fellows in Japan. We didn't know how they were being treated, but we just had a horror of it. We figured that they'd be a lot worse off among the Japanese. We had Formosan guards over us which weren't too bad at all in fact they were I think, more friendly to us than they were to the Japanese. They'd been drafted into the Japanese 19 army and they didn't want to be there any more than we did. So they were pretty good fellows. Much as we could... Of course, we didn't dare intermingle with them or communicate with them too much because there was always a few Japanese guards that would watch us. RT: Well, I think I've... in this discussion so far you've answered a lot of my questions. You felt me out as far as I'm concerned...realizing what it was like to be a prisoner of war in the Pacific, in China and Japan, so I've... is there anything else that you'd like to say or add to this? CM: I can only think of one thing on ship from Shanghai to North China, a friend of mine, a very good friend, Milt Taylor, had been making preparations to escape all during the war and we had been getting some Red Cross boxes and he'd saved up quite a bit of food and supplies and spent some time with maps and so forth and tried to decide whether he would go and he wanted me to go with him, but I figured the war was too near at an end already Germany had capitulated and so I didn't figure it was worth the risk, because I had a family back home and of course he didn't, he was single. But he did take another fellow with him and they jumped the train about two days out of Nanking and this Jack Hernandes, the fellow that went with him, broke his leg when he hit one of the tires on the track and they caught him but he told Bill Taylor to go and try to get away himself, and so he finally did. He got caught once and he finally got away but he had a hard time making it because it was a long ways to the place where the Americans were stationed. I forget the name of the place. RT: But he finally made it? 20 CM: He finally made it but he only got home about a month or six weeks before we did actually. He had to hitchhike it all that way and then hide up at night and... hide up in the daytime rather and travel at night, and then he had to go clear over to India and by the time he hitchhiked it back to the States, why , he was about better than two months. He did have quite a few hair raising experiences, in that escape deal. Well, a white person in the orient, this shows up like a lighthouse. The Chinese would sell you out as quickly as the Japanese. The Japanese would pay them a bounty on every American they caught so you couldn't look for any friendship from the Chinese. RT: So he was all on his own? CM: That's right. So he was extremely lucky he got to make it that far. I think it was several hundred miles. RT: Yes, I imagine he had a lot of close calls during that time. CM: Yes! Yes, he did. He had several of them. I guess that's about all I have to say. RT: Well, I certainly want to thank you, and I'm sure that this information can be used to a great extent by the Utah historical society. Thank you very much. CM: Very good... {End of tape} 21