After being stripped of everything, including our hope of escape from that island, the Japanese soldiers led us away through the snow. It was starting to get dark, and I motioned to one of the men that I had to relieve myself, and he indicated I should go off to the side and take care of it. I took two or three steps and broke through some ice and fell into water over my waist. The soldier pulled me out, and I don’t remember if I took care of my business or not, but I was so cold and wet after that it didn’t matter much.

We finally arrived at a group of buildings, where one Japanese hero decided to beat the hell out of us with his fists. He struck each of us several times and when he swung at me, I moved a bit so his blow didn’t do much damage, but I dropped to the ground anyway to make him think he had hurt me. It was nightfall by then, and they took us into a barracks-like building and literally threw us into it. There we spent the night with wet clothing, freezing, with no fire and no food.

The next day they took us out and blindfolded us, and handcuffed and tied our hands behind our backs. With one soldier on each side holding and guiding us, we started walking. We walked for some time, then stopped, and they had us put our backs up against a wall. I was able to lift my head enough to peek out under the blindfold, and saw what I expected to see, five or six soldiers facing us with rifles in their hands. Obviously that could mean only one thing, we were about to be shot. Strangely, when I was resigned to the fact that I would never get out of alive, I just wanted to get it over with and be done with it all. Of course, they didn’t shoot us or you wouldn’t be reading this story, but I’ll never forget that moment. What they did do was put us aboard a ship to take us to the island of Paramushir. There they put us in individual cells, which were actually supposed to be used for their own military, not POWs. The cells were about 6’x10’, the floor was the bed, table and chair, the toilet was a hole in the ground. Food was a ball of rice about the size of a baseball, twice a day.

They were curious about the wires in my teddy bear suit, and one of them cut the connection out so I had wires dangling all over, which made me look like a mechanical man. Everyone who came into the cell would point to the wires and indicate that they wanted to know what they were for. How do you explain something like that when you don’t have the language? By then I knew the word for plane, so I said it, then shivered like I was cold, then mimed plugging a plug into a wall outlet, and finally smiling and relaxing, like I was warm again. It’s amazing what can be done with sign language when you have to. It was very cold up there, so pretending to shiver wasn’t difficult, but someone came into the cell at night with several blankets, and showed me how to fold the blankets over myself at night to keep warm. This was a very welcome surprise.

I believe most of the Japanese in this facility had never seen a Westerner before, and I was an object of curiosity almost all day long. One man came into my cell a couple times a day for several days and with a pencil drew a small oblong on the wooden wall. The drawing was about an inch long, a half inch high, and in the middle of it he drew a star. He would point at me and then point at the drawing. Now, to show you the way my mind was working at the time, I interpreted this as the picture of a coffin they were going to put me in after killing me. I kept shaking my head "no" when he pointed, and he finally stopped coming in to draw the picture. Much later, I discovered that what he was drawing was the Japanese Second Lieutenant insignia, and I guess he was trying to tell me that was my rank.

One day another man came with a small table about a foot high. He sat down on one side and motioned for me to sit on the side. What he wanted, believe it or not, was to arm wrestle. After we grasped hands and got into position, it was clear I could beat him, but I decided not to that in front of the other soldiers present. But I wouldn’t let him win either, so we just went back and forth for awhile until he tired of the game. The next day he came back for more, but unfortunately for him a soldier of higher rank walked in and started screaming at him. The was the end of our game, but it served as a diversion for a couple of days.

A day or two later another soldier came in and informed me, in flawless English, that he would be my interpreter. It turned out that he had graduated from some college in California and had gone to Japan for a visit and was there when the war broke out. He was not allowed to go back to the States and was inducted into the Army, much against his will. I got the impression this was the last place he wanted to be, which was of course the way I felt, too. Almost every day he would take me out of my cold cell and take me to another room where there was a brazier so I could warm up. I guess he was supposed to be questioning me, but he didn’t really and we just wound up talking about all kinds of other, neutral things. It was a pleasant break from my monotony and constant trepidation.

One day I asked him if I could get a bath and a shave, and he said he would see what he could do. The next day I was taken to a Japanese bathhouse, where I stripped down and started to jump into the pool of heated water. A guard grabbed me and shook his head no, and showed in signs how to take a bath the Japanese way. First, outside the pool you poured water over yourself and lathered up, then rinsed off. Then you jumped into the heated pool to soak and relax. When he decided I had relaxed enough, he pulled me out and sat me down on some very slippery duck boards. Then he pulled out a straight razor and proceeded to give me the closest shave I’ve ever in my life had. Of course I was very nervous during the shave, because on those boards with that sharp razor, I knew if one of us slipped it could do considerable harm. But he finished without mishap, and I dressed in my filthy clothes and returned to my cell. That was the only bath or shave I got during the time I was a POW.

A few days later, I think, by then I had lost track of days, a Japanese officer in a beautiful blue uniform stopped at the door to my cell, looked in, and then walked on. I assumed he was in the Navy because of his uniform. A few minutes later I saw him walk by again, taking my pilot, co-pilot and radio man out of the cell area. That was the last time I saw them. The interpreter had told me that they were going to send us to Japan proper because they had no provisions for POWs in the Kurile Islands. I asked him how they were going to transport us and he said the obvious way would be by ship. I guess I turned white, because he asked if I was afraid of our submarines. I knew there were American subs operating in the area because, before leaving on our last mission we were given a line of position, which was an angle line, because there would be submarines above that line of position. If we saw a sub in that area, even if we thought it was a Japanese sub, we were not to attempt to bomb it. However, if we saw a sub below that line, there should be no American subs there so we could attack. As it was, we saw no subs at all on the way to the target area.

Shortly after he told me this, he let me know that the next day I would be going to Japan, but that for some reason they were going to fly me down. The next day he came and I was tied, handcuffed and blindfolded, and led out with a guard holding onto each side of me, the usual mode of travel for the POW. I don’t remember the mode of transport to the airfield, but I knew when we got there from the familiar sounds. Before they put me on the plane, the interpreter said "Sound like a bunch of tin cans, don’t they." Then they again literally threw me into the back of the plane, and we took off.

A NEW HOME

We finally landed somewhere, I didn’t know where at the time, and they took me off the plane and put a big hat on me so no one could see my face. I don’t know why, I would have thought I would be a trophy for them. We got on a train, which I could tell was crowded even with the blindfold on, and the soldiers kicked some people out of their seats so we could sit down. When we got to our stop, they led me off the train and put me either in a car or in a sidecar on a motorcycle, I don’t recall which. Our destination was what I found out later was a Japanese army camp. There I was put into a solitary cell, which was pretty much a duplicate of the one I was in on Shumushu, except there were not enough blankets to begin to keep warm.

Several days after I arrived I was taken out, again blindfolded, tied and handcuffed and driven somewhere. I was seated in a chair in a strange room and the blindfold and restraints were removed. Then a group of four or five high ranking officers came in literally dragging their samurai swords, since they were so short and the swords so long, and sat down on a dais facing me. I could tell they were high ranking because of all the gold braid, and I got the impression that they were the old guard Japanese soldiers from a long line of military men. Following them was a soldier who, in very bad English, told me he was going to be the interpreter.

To me, the Japanese language is very guttural, so when I say that one of the officers barked an order to the soldier that’s exactly what it sounded like to me. The interpreter in turn told me to stand up and bow to the officers. Don’t ask me why, but for some crazy reason I refused to bow. I guess I figured, what the hell, I’m not going to get out of here alive anyway. But I did salute them. There was a silence from the officers, which made me very nervous. Then they began to bark questions at the interpreter. They wanted to know the usual things, where I came from, how many planes, how many men, etc. Even if I had wanted to tell them anything, I couldn’t because I didn’t have the answers. So when they asked things like how long the runways were, I would give them any crazy answer or say I don’t know. Then they would yell what sounded like "bakka" or "bakku", which I found out later meant "fool".

Then the interpreter held up a device they had taken from our plane and told me the officers wanted to know what it was used for. It was a device that we used very occasionally in a training missing to calculate the errors in a compass. Every compass had errors in it of one to several degrees due to various things, even the bomb load could affect it. It was used to sight on the sun and go through calculations to determine the compass degree. Then we would turn every 15° to take another reading, which would be marked down by the pilot or co-pilot. So how do you even begin explaining this to an interpreter who can barely speak English, let alone isn’t even a pilot, let alone a navigator. So of course I had no luck at all and was just called a "bakka" a lot.

Finally they left for lunch and I just sat there awaiting their return. After lunch there were a few more hours of questioning and at one time I remember telling them that if I knew any of the answers, I would tell them because there wasn’t a damn thing they could do with that information anyway. That was kind of gutsy looking back on it. But I did something even stupider. I asked the interpreter to ask them to give me a cigarette. The interpreter turned white as a sheet because her wasn’t about to ask those guys to give an American prisoner a cigarette. He didn’t say a word until the officers demanded to know what I had said, then he had to tell them. They thought about it for awhile, then gave the interpreter a cigarette to give to me.

After they were done with their questioning, they took me, again tied up etc., and put me in a truck, which delivered me to yet another cell, not the one in the army camp where I had been. There I was put into a cell still with my hands handcuffed behind my back, with an armed guard sitting outside the locked cell. Where was I going to go? I was kept there three or four days with no food during the duration. I was still wearing my flight clothes, which had zippers from throat the crotch, so when I had to urinate, I had to get the guard to come in and take the handcuffs off so I could take care of business. This was always an ordeal because the guards either couldn’t or didn’t want to understand what I wanted. When they did finally come in to help, they stood right there until I was done and replaced the handcuffs immediately.

After those few days, I was again taken out and returned to the army camp cell where I had been before. I lost all track of time, nothing was going on for days, and if you were to ask me what I thought about during that time in solitary, I honestly couldn’t tell you. One very depressing thought was that my family would never know what happened to me, if I had died and, if so, where. I do remember desperately wanting someone to talk to, to share my fears and commiserate with, to reassure each other that we would get out of there. I felt that misery indeed would love company, even if it entailed going to a POW camp. At least there would be other people there to talk to. As I found out later, this would not have been a good idea. I was actually very well off compared to other POWs in Japan, who were being tortured, beaten, bayoneted, starved, clubbed and murdered by the Japanese. They were also being used as slave labor in addition to their other mistreatment.

My worst torture during that period of time was the infected sores I developed from lice and other vermin bites. These sores developed from my scratching myself with filthy hands, and were constantly draining blood and pus. My clothes would stick to me and reopen any sores that had begun to heal. Once, for lack of anything better to do, I took off my clothes and counted sixty sores just from my buttocks down to my ankles. And my legs were so swollen that I could make a dent in about ¼" to ½" with my finger. I later found out that most of these problems were caused from beri-beri, which I had contracted due to the poor nutrition in my rice-only diet.

At some point in during this tedium, an officer came to the front of my cell and said "I have bad news for you." Of course my first thought was that I was to be executed, a thought I had lived with constantly for some time. But he continued on saying, "Three of your comrades were on a Japanese ship. We were bringing them here, and the ship was torpedoed by an American sub and all were lost." I knew they were the three who had been led past my cell weeks before, when I was still on Paramushir. After the war, I had to repeat in writing what this officer had said when I was asked by the War Department if I knew what had happened to those three men. This was the only information anyone ever had on the fate of these three men.