Evidently the Japanese had brought over cavalry horses with a bed of coal in
the hold for the horses to stand on or lie on. There was crap all over the
place. We marched down into the hold in alphabetical order. Guess what —
my name's Amos. I'm one of the first ones on the ship. There isn't room
enough to put all the men in. They push us closer together. I'm Amos. I'm
way back at the stern of the ship right up against the bulwark. I see what's
going on. I tell my buddies, "Put your foot up against the back of the ship,
and don't move back any farther." So we got a little extra room. A lot of
the guys who had blankets tied them to the frame of the ship, like
hammocks.
We were on that ship 80-some-odd days. No facilities. You want to go the bathroom. The Japanese would allow two men up on the top deck. They'd lower a five-gallon bucket down. They'd pass it from man to man. When it got full, absolutely wouldn't hold any more, then you'd pass it back to the front, everybody cursing, "Don't you spill that stuff on me!"
We ate the same way — five-gallon buckets. You'd get half a canteen cup of rice a day, half a canteen cup of water a day. That's how we existed.
Many a guy couldn't hold himself. What you did was dig a hole in the coal, and you relieved yourself. Your buddies didn't like it, but what are you going to do?
Eventually the ship docked in Taiwan. We were there three months at the longest. They put us aboard a ship— a nice ship this time. One of their top-ranking freighters, I guess. We went from Taiwan to Osaka. Contrary to popular opinion, Japan was not warm. Osaka was the coldest place I have ever been in in my life. We were in a big warehouse of some kind. Everybody at that time had a blanket, and the Japanese gave us woolen Japanese uniforms. We'd put three or four guys together, put all the blankets on top of us, and we still weren't warm.
Thank God, this lasted only a couple of days. They put us aboard trains then. We went up to a little place called Kosaka, way up at the northern end of Honshu. You have never seen it so cold.
We got up there, and we marched into this camp. Cold? My gosh, it was cold! There weren't enough prisoners to fill all the buildings. These buildings, they were made of pine lumber. No insulation of course. It was just like a summer camp.
We had stoves. They gave us three or four pieces of wood. How long would that last? An hour? This one guy, Golightly — he was a first sergeant — he gets a bright idea. He went to one of the empty buildings, he and another guy, and they got under the building, which was on posts. They pulled out the floor joists. They'd break them up and bring them back and burn them in the stove. The funny part of it, the Japanese guards warmed themselves at the stove, and all the rest of the buildings were colder than hell.
Well, the Japanese finally decided to pull an inspection on the camp. They go in the empty barracks, and the floor goes crash. They decided they were going to take some action, but they never found out who did it.
But we were freezing to death — 24 hours a day. Eventually we got to work near these Japanese mines — copper mines. They had a lot of coal lying around to smelt the copper. So I said to the other guys, "Why don't you walk up, very casual, pick up a piece of coal and put it in your pocket. You don't have to take much, just a small piece." "Good idea!"
That was good. You'd get back home at night. The guys would empty out their pockets. You'd have enough to keep you warm. That went on for quite a few days until some dizzy cluck wasn't satisfied with taking just a little bit and he got caught. He got a couple of raps, and we got a warning of severe punishment if it happened again.
The reason we knew the war was coming to a close was that Americans who had been working in the shipyards in Osaka were brought up to our camp. They brought news with them. The B-29's had bombed the hell out of the shipyards.
These guys knew how to live in prison camp. We were like rubes in the country. They were the city slickers. Had the guards bribed in no time at all. They managed in the short time they were with us —; they were so well organized ‹ that they absolutely and positively controlled the Japanese. One guy even had a radio that he had made from light fixtures and other things he'd gotten down in Osaka.
They even had salt. We didn't have any salt. Salt was like gold. Just American ingenuity, what they did down in Osaka. They had access to five-gallon buckets. They'd put salt water in these buckets. They'd take the hot, molten steel that they had. They'd put the buckets on the molten steel, steam the water off, and they'd have salt.
My most harrowing experience, personally, was near the end of the war. The Japanese had gotten these big Red Cross army overcoats, big warm things, but they never gave them to us. Near the end of the war they decided, I guess, to get rid of the coats. When we were going to work one morning — the railroad wasn't too far from the mining place — they decided the prisoners would carry these coats down to be shipped some place else.
The way they carry things in the Orient, you have a pole between two guys as you walk along. I got on with this wise guy. He decides he isn't going to move. A Japanese comes up and gives him a friendly kick in the behind. "Speedo!" That was their favorite word when they wanted you to move. This guy, he started to change his tune. We're a long distance from the rest of the contingent of men. And he decides to do the double trot. The pole breaks and dumps our load. I got mad, and I'm afraid I swore.
The Japanese guard decided I swore at him. So he takes a shot at me, cuffs my ear, and gives me to understand at tinko — that's roll call, when we go back to our camp — he's going to take it out on me. I worked all day, came back to camp. My number was san-ju-nee, thirty-two. He's walking up and down, looking for me. "Hey, san-ju-nee!" I have to step out. They take me into the Japanese headquarters, and they worked me over — pretty good.
Fortunately, the Japanese never threw an American punch. They didn't know how to do it. They never hit you straight on. They'd always roundhouse you, so you could roll with it. They might bruise you up a bit, but they never knocked you out. I could take that. Then he decided he was really going to get rough with me. He bends me over a chair and takes out this big Japanese two-handled sword and places it at my throat. I thought I'd had it. He's going to cleave me. But then I thought, "Too close to the end of the war. He's only bluffing." He quit. I ended up in ace-hole — that's solitary confinement — with no blanket, nothing. Thank God, it was somewhere around April.
There was another guy in there that they put me in with. He had just got his
blanket restored. When I get thrown in with him, they take his blanket away.
In order to keep warm, one guy would stand against the inside partition of
the building. The other guy would wrap himself around him to keep the guy on
the inside warm. Then we'd trade places.
I stayed in ace-hole one night. The next morning, the Japanese interpreter
came. He'd been out of the camp the day before. Believe it or not, he was a
Christian. He wore a cross. He wanted to know what had happened. I told
him the situation, that I didn't swear at the guard — I was just mad because
the damn pole broke. So he looks at me and goes "keeeeeh!" That's what
they do when they're surprised. "Keeeeeh! A grave mistake has been
made."
We stayed at Kosaka until the surrender. The only reason we knew the war
was over with was that all the Japanese took off. We got up in the morning
— there wasn't a soul left. The first thing we did, of course, was raid the
kitchen.
The Navy came over first, bless their hearts. The fighter/bombers dropped
supplies and medicine. Rations, emergency rations, 10-man rations, C
rations. That was beautiful.
The very next day, the Air Force B-29's came over. Man, did they drop!
They dropped 55-gallon drums welded together. I think there were about
three of them welded together, making a long cylinder. They had uniforms in
them, clothing, cigarettes, candy.
Man, we ate and we ate and we ate. You can't imagine what a man will do
when he's been deprived. We had four meals a day that our cooks that we
had with us would cook up. Between meals we'd have candy, and we'd chew
gum just till the flavor ran out and then spit it out and put some more in. We
got so full — this was the truth, I'm not exaggerating — that you couldn't
stand up because your belly was so full. You couldn't sit down. You couldn't
lie down.
It was so bad. We had this GI, a buck sergeant from the 31st Infantry. Nice
guy. He and his buddy made a vow that as soon as they could, they were
going to eat as much rice as they possibly could — all they wanted to. Now,
remember, this is after four meals. So they went into the kitchen. They got
themselves a bunch of rice and barley. They cooked it up. They sat down
and ate it. And guess what? That night, the buck sergeant got a kink in his
intestine. They took him down to the Japanese hospital. He died from
overeating.
The parachutes that they dropped from the B-29's —big parachutes made
of nylon — they were red, white, and blue. My buddy, Rosie Bramley, he was
like the camp tailor — more for the Japanese troops than for the Americans.
He had a sewing machine. Rosie gets the idea, since we don't have a flag,
that we'll make a flag. I get in on the deal because I was more or less an
engineer — good at drawing things. I made a five-pointed star, made a
template so we could cut them out of the parachutes. Rosie sat down and
made an American flag. We flew it from the compound.
Except for those drops, we didn't hear anything from anybody. After a
while, we decided we'd been there long enough. We went into the village of
Kosaka and took over a train. We headed south — there was no other
direction to go. As we went along, we picked up some other PW's who
apprently had the same idea. There were maybe 300 or 400 of us, including
some Dutch that the Japanese had captured in Sumatra and Borneo...
We ended up in a seaport. We went aboard medical ships. They had troops
there for interrogation purposes. The first thing they did to us —
remember, we'd just gotten brand-new uniforms: slacks, field jackets, Eisenhower jackets. Beautiful, everything! And when we got aboard the ship,
guess what? They deloused us. They took every piece of clothing off us and
threw it in the bay. We almost went in after it.
We were on the ship, I think, one night. Then destroyers picked us up from
there. That was some ride, too. It's something to ride on a destroyer. Up,
down, sideways! They took us to a big American airbase. We got aboard
bombers with benches where the bomb racks had been. They took us to the
Philippines.
In the Philippines, we stayed in a repple-depple (replacement depot) and had
access to all the food we wanted. I went from 89 pounds at the start to
146. When I came home, I weighed 165. We ate. We had milk. We hadn't
had milk in so long it was a strange article. It was canned milk. That was a
mistake. When we'd go in the mess hall to eat and they opened a milk can,
we'd just take the can and empty it. They'd have to bring more cans. We'd
take those cans and drink that.
A lot of us went to Clark Field to try to hook a ride home. Clark Field, our
old stamping grounds, where we went to some of the barrooms we used to
hang out at. One high class place, the woman had a huge bedsheet. Anybody
who came by signed the bedsheet. You could pick up the bedsheet and glance
through it. "Oh, so and so came back."
Finally we came home, on an Army transport — a Liberty ship. Arrived in
San Francisco sometime in October '45, two months after the end of the
war.
(Charlie Amos stayed in the service and became one of the Air Force's first
chief master sergeants. Retiring in 1961 after 22 years in uniform, he
taught science and math at the junior high level in Ludlow and East
Longmeadow. He told his story to The Register in December of 1998.)