MF: You can season yourself to it, yeah.
AK: Getting on that boat, then, go ahead with that.
MF: We went, like you say, Cabanatuan and stayed all night and the next day they marched us down to pier 14 in Manila.
AK: Is this going to be a Hell Ship we're going to get on?
MF: Well, sort of. Its no comparison to what come later on. I mean, to us it was pretty bad, pretty rough, but it wadn't impossible. Anyway, that afternoon we got on this, I don't recall the name of it,. They put 500 of us in one floor. Down in the hole. Lets see, third layer, third deck down. They put 500 of us in there. They was so many of us only half of us could lay down at a time, the other half had to sit up. We got on that ship like late this afternoon and when the sun went down they closed the hole up but they did have an air shoot coming in there but it was still awful hot down in there. We had on these Phillipino army fatigues. They was real thin. We took them off and all we had on was our shorts, or G-string or whatever you want to call it. Because we was always so hot we was sweating up a storm. We had a lot of guys had dysentery. You can imagine them people. Right in the center we had a big old bucket out there. If you had to use the bathroom you had to go out to that center to use it. These people with diarrhea, dysentery, they would try to get out there, and they was strewing the human waste all the way across, time they got out there it was too late. It was awful. Afte the first night we was going north we got out, well a little longer than the first night, it took about all night and all day and the next day we got out of the tropics where it was so hot. Then it started getting better down in that hole, it started cooling off a whole lot better. We was just getting ro...
<034>...<037>
...guys that died on that trip and they buried them at sea.
Skip Rew (sp?), I don't know, you remember Major Rew?
AK: I don't remember if I talked to him.
MF: He was on that trip with us. They had the officers out in that
center. He was in bad shape. He had dysentery and I tell you old
Skip would have died. Me and this boy Lawson, Arnold Lawson (sp?) we
got old Skip, cause I always thought a lot of him, got him up in the
bay with us. He wouldn't eat, I mean he was in bad shape. He
wouldn't eat and we cussed him and downed him, oh we done everything
you could think of, and got him mad. We got him mad and he ate a
little rice. We'd save our rice cause we was in pretty good shape.
We'd eat a little of ours, make him eat all of his and some of ours.
He forced it down. We called him a quitter, and I don't know what all
we did. We did everthing we could think of. By the time we got to
Japan though he was feeling a whole lot better. If we'd ignored him
he'd of died.
AK: You saved his life. Compassion.
MF: Yeah.
AK: I guess anger is a tool for survival isn't it?
MF: Thats right. We made him realize, we said "you're a damn quitter"
"you're a..." I don't know, I don't recall what all we said but it was
enough to get him roused up because he was always a proud person the
way he carries himself and all that and we was downing him for
everything we could think of.
AK: You know I've heard others say that you make a person angry and
thats the way you survive. Is that correct evaluation?
MF: That's right.
AK: Have you seen that happen more than once? where...
MF: Oh yeah, we had this Spare (sp?) boy...
AK: Did you use that as a technique to make them mad, you'd
deliberately try to make them mad?
MF: Yeah, oh yeah, make them mad...
AK: I mean, you did it more than once? yourself?
MF: Oh yeah. We did it a whole lot of times.
AK: Talk about the Spare (sp?) boy. You were going to say.
MF: Well he was one of them guys that just give up. We downed him and
criticized him and degraded him. It'd perk him up. Then an Anness
boy, boy name of Elsie Anness, after we got to Japan, he got
dysentery. But we couldn't perk him up. He'd just, He was like the old
saying, he was just to far gone, he died. But anyway, we get back to
going on this ship. Fortunate, lucky me, I got on a chow detail.
Lets see, twice a day I get up top side on that old ship. They had
fresh water up there. I'd wash my face, wash my hands, and bring the
food down and dish it out to all the troops in there. This
Lawson (sp?) boy, we's both from Harrodsburgh, he was a tank driver,
he was a pretty sturdy old boy. I got on that rice hauling detail
feeding the troops. It took us, lets see, about the first day of
November we got on the ship in Manila, Pier 14, we arrived in Taiwan,
well I don't recall how many days. We come to Taiwan and went in the
harbor there and stayed overnight to miss a typhoon or something. The
next day we went, started out again, and got in Kobe, from the 25th
day of November we'd been on that ship for 25 days. And thats not a
very far trip up through there. They zig-zagged all over the China
sea. I never did know why because we wadn't attacked, as I recall, at
all going up through there. We got in Japan late in the evening and
we got off this old ship and it was spitting snow.
AK: Thats a new experience for you wadn't it?
MF: Yeah. We got off that ship lot getting out of a furnace and
getting off that ship we did have blankets and we had on these
Phillipino army fatigues. We got off that ship and marched, I don't
know how far, we went in a place like a big gymnasium. They fed us.
They give us these little rice blocks. They was about 12 by 8 wide,
about an inch and a half thick. They had rice and fish and kelp,
seweed, everything in the world. I mean it was really a chow down.
We went in there and eat all that up and stayed there the rest of the
night. The next day we got on a train. We was in passenger cars but
they had no heat. It was daggone cold! We rode all that day, on this
train. Finally got to this place they called Tanagua (pronounced
"tannagawa"). Thats the one I was telling you about. We got off that
train and marched and marched and marched. We went way down the
coastline and went in this brand new camp that they'd built. But the
worst thing about that camp, all the water had froze up, and from
November to about the last of March they only water we got was, to
drink, was tea. We didn't get any water to take a bath or wash our
mess equipment or anything like that. That was from the last past of
November, December, January, February, and the last of March the
weather started thawing up and then we starting to get water. We
lived in these barracks. They had two floors, bottom and upper floor
and they had mats over straw. By going that long we had body lice out
of this world. I mean there was millions of them and we couldn't wash
our clothes or nothing. We made a big joke out of it. Guys said "I
bet I got a million!" Somebody said "I think I got two million!, so
lets count em!" Anyway, we had, lets see, November, December,
January, February, March...
AK: This is March, 43.
MF: Yeah. We had about...
AK: Is your old crew still with you? You maintenance crew?
MF: No, we'd been split up. I don't think I had one...
AK: Was Rew (sp?) going to be with you at this camp?
MF: No, no, when we got to...
AK: Spare (sp?), is going to be with you at this camp?
MF: Yeah, Doc Spare (sp?) he was with us.
AK: Who else was here from D company?
MF: Kentucky, Arnold Lawson and a boy named Elsie Anness.
AK: Lawson was from Harrodsburgh wadn't he?
MF: Yeah.
AK: What'd you call that camp?
MF: Tanagua. It was a...
AK: 'T' 'A' 'N' 'A' ?
MF: Yeah, 'G' 'U' 'A', I think thats correct.
AK: Tanagua. Alright, its on Honshu, the main island. Its in the
southwest side of it?
MF: Yeah.
AK: Its not too far from Hiroshima.
MF: I don't know how far, but we seen the mushroom from the atomic
bomb from there.
AK: You was close enough to see it.
MF: Yeah.
AK: Alright. Now this is Tanagua, about how many is to be there
altogether? You got Lawson from Harrodsburgh...
MF: Yeah, Lawson, myself, the boy named Anness,
AK: Was he from Harrodsburgh?
MF: Yeah. 'A' 'N' 'N' 'E' 'S' 'S'. And Sparrow (sp?), he was from
Harrodsburgh, well he lived over at Bergen.
AK: Are all of you going to get back, through this?
MF: Me and Lawson and Sparrow (sp?), but Anness he didn't make it.
AK: He didn't make it. He died in that camp?
MF: Yeah.
AK: OK. Was there another one besides, theres Lawson, Anness,
Sparrow (sp?), was there another one? from D company?
MF: Lets see... No I believe that was it.
AK: What happened to Anness? Do you know?
MF: Joe Anness?
AK: Yeah.
MF: Well he got detoured and went to...
AK: No, I mean the guy that died in your camp there.
MF: Oh. well..
AK: What was his name, his first name?
MF: Elsie.
AK: Elsie?
MF: Yeah.
AK: Did he have a brother that did't make it too?
MF: No, he didn't have a brother. Joe Anness, Joe was his uncle.
AK: Oh. So there was an uncle and a nephew that went together they
died in the camp.
MF: Yeah, the nephew. Joe, he got back.
AK: OK. Alright go ahead.
MF: Lets see. In that span we had 500 people to start off with. That
first winter it was three hundred and some off, it was over 200 people
died in that rest of November, December, January, February, March.
Almost half of that 500 died from Pnuemonia, dysentery, a lot of them
died with heart attacks, beri-beri.
AK: What was it caused all this?
MF: Malnutrition.
AK: They gonna cut your food down now?
MF: Yeah.
MF: Or is this from other times?
MF: All this adding up together, we was in pretty bad physical shape.
AK. Thats a big rate there isn't it? You see, thats about as bad as
they did anyplace else! At O'Donnel or anyplace else.
MF: Well I started out there my PO Dummy was 305. At the end of that
winter it went down to 17. No 27, it went down to 27.
AK: What do you mean?
MF: As the people died they'd move you number back.
AK: Oh really? You moved from 300 back to...
MF: 305 back to 27. That was, well just not that winter, but...
AK: The whole time you were there?
MF: Yeah. Ever so often they'd have them renumber them see. When I
was liberated I was number 27 of that original 500 people. After that
winter we got, well after the weather warmed up, we got water on where
we could wash up and clean up and boil all our clothes and get rid of
the lice then the fleas took over. But they harrassed us all the
time. We fire drills at one and two o'clock in the morning. Fall out
of them barracks in the snow barefooted. You do some little something
that didn't amount to nothing, they'd make you stand all night with a
bucket of water on top your head, or maybe stand there with two
buckets one in each hand. Just stand there all night long. Or if it
was raining they might put you out by the flagpole and tie your hands
behing you...
AK: To the flagpole?
MF: ...on the flagpole, like that. And if some little instance would
happen out on the job, where we was working on this big dry dock. We
was doing pick and shovel work, moving dirt. We'd do that from 8 in
the morning to 5 in the afternoon 7 days a week.
AK: What were you doing on the drydock, what were you building?
MF: They was building this dry dock to where they could bring ships in
and pump all the water out.
AK: So you were making it by hauling dirt?
MF: Yeah.
AK: Carrying dirt on your back or something?
MF: No, they had little cars with track run in there. They had these
little cars that held a yard of dirt. And they had two POWs assigned
to a car. Some of the POWs would run jackhammers, drill holes, and do
the blasting, thats what I done a lot. I run a jackhammer, drilled a
holes. Me and this guy named Juran (sp?) out of the 200 Coast
Artillery, from Texas. We'd drill way back in them cliffs and put
enough dynamite to blow the damn... When it blowed, it'd be hard to
find 3 or 4 carloads of rock. I mean we wasted tons of dynamite,
believe it or not.
AK: On purpose.
MF: Oh yeah. There was other guys doing other things too, you know.
Lets see...
AK: You were talking about the harrassments, you know, when I
interrupted you.
MF: They'd fall us outside, yeah, out on the work job, when we was out
on work. If we didn't get enough cars, say they give us, say each
team they give us 10 cars a day, or maybe 20 cars, and we didn't get
maybe 12 or 15 of them. Sometime there was something to load and
sometime there wadn't somthing to load. If two or three people in
that group, in that one detail, didn't come up then they'd take the
whole detail, they had us broke down in 50 man detail, take us back in
camp, say at quiting time and we'd have to stand at attention from
that time till reveille the next morning and go back to work that next
day. What would normally happen after that would happen then the
whole, everybody would slow down. Everybody! I mean the officers, we
had 5 captains with us, and they put the word out "Today... down." I
recall we was supposed to been, when we first got there, we was
supposed to be getting 20 cars a day. We stayed there two years and
something. At the end of that two years, if we was getting 5 out a
day they was glad of it. Thats how much we slowed down over the time,
see. They would punish us, punish the group. When they did punish
the group the whole, everybody just slowed down. We done all kind of
sabotage work. I was, like you say, mechanical inclined, and I run a
cement mixer, I run an electric crane, I run a great big electric
winch, I done all kinds of things like that. That big cement mixer,
it was a big one. A great big thing. They had two big hoppers that
you put water in, a certain amount of water and so many bags of cement
and mix it up see. Then you had a trip place and so much of that
cement would go down in theis great big old, you know like these
trucks haul? a big old drum, and so much sand and so much rock. Well
this hopper over here somebody, not me, would put red tar on these
little, we had a narrow gauge track that we pushed these cars on,
somebody would put coal tar in that cement. The big old augers in
there mixing it up you wouldn't notice it unless you stopped them.
When you did it would come to the top, that oil would come up on top.
Somebody would put tar in that mixer. But most of the time it kept
going and I'd use it all and they never did detect it. About a month
or so later whevever we poured that cement it'd start crumbling out.
I never did know who was the instigator of that was. It wadn't me! I
know that much. One of the things we had, on this big old electric
motor that pulled that old big cement mixer, you may have seen these
old steam engines with these big oil reservoirs setting up there over
the bearings, I don't know if you've ever seen one of them or not, but
anyway, I'd take powdered cement and put in that thing. It was my
responsibility to see they had oil in them and see that they got
oiled. I put this cement, put it in there and mix it up real good,
both of them, let it run for a day or so, take it off and clean it out
real good and put fresh oil in there but that was too late. They had
big bushings in there. Them things would whine and start squeeling,
but before I would do that though I'd get the word from one of the
captains in our compound because when they start pouring cement that
run day and night. Sometimes we'd pour for a week and a half or two
weeks and never stop. I mean, the same guys, you run 8 hours then
another team would go on, then another team would go on, then the
first team would go right back on again see. I tell you that got old
fast. One of the captains said "Ok, its time for that cement mixer to
quit operating." It was up to me to figure out how I was going to
stop it from operating. It had oil in that, oil in the cement,
putting the cement down in the oil where it lubricated them bearings
and it would take 3 or 4 days to get new bearings. There was great
big old ford bearings go down inside that thing. It'd take 3 or 4
days to get them, then that'd give the guys a chance to kind of
recuperate a little bit see.
AK: Who was the Captain that you're talking about?
MF: Well, we had a Captain Riley and it was 3 more of them, but
Captain Riley, he was our American camp commander. We had Captain
Galverth (sp?), I remember him too. Captain Galverth (sp?), Captain
Riley (sp?), and the other two I don't recall them. I don't recall
their names.
AK: Did they do a pretty good job of helping you all?
MF: Oh yeah.
AK: Looking out for your welfare?
MF: This Captain Galverth (sp?), he was fighting the Japanese, the
Commander, and anybody else all the time, boy, he got beat up lot of
the times, but he got his point across. I tell you them four guys,
like the old man says, we'd of went to hell for them guys cause they
was...
AK: Fighting for you'all eh?
MF: We had a whole lot of officers that come in there with us then
the Japanese left it up to us to pick the officers that we wanted to
stay with us. I didn't know any of those guys, but the was other
enlisted people that knew them, knew all of them see, and they was the
ones that they selected to stay with us.
AK: Is that right?
MF: Yeah.
AK: What'd they do with the other officers?
MF: They took them, lets see, I forget, I used to know that name, well
I tell you, they took all the officers and put them in a camp to
theirself. General Wainwright and all them, they kind of kept the
officers together.
AK: You were talking about shutting the crusher down when I asked you
a question.
MF: Well, like I was saying, them old bearings would go out on that
thing. We had another thing, couple of other things. Where they
pulled the cars out of the pit where they was building this dry dock,
they had pile-ons (sp?) in here to keep the ocean from coming in. We
had a ramp to pull the cars up and go out on a pier then they'd dump
them cars in a barge then they'd take it out there and it was making a
breakwater. With the rock that was taken out of that pit where they
was making that dry dock down there. We had an old boy named
Gallagher (sp?), he's from Montana somewhere, I don't know. He
operated this big old winch. The word would be "tomorrow something
happen". And it would. Tomorrow one of the guys down would just half
put the pin in the front car, they took out four cars at a time.
They'd get about two thirds of the way up, hit the big old clutch and
then when they did it'd bend the coupling pin, zoom! Back down in the
pit them cars would go. They would tear up track, they would tear up
cars, they'd be at least a week before we'd get all them tracks and
everything put back in place see.
AK: Was this a kind of retaliation for something the Japs had done to
you?
MF: Yeah! Thats right. They had these big transformers where they
got all the electricity from. We had Navy, Air Force, Marines, Army,
everybody. We was all mixed up see. We had somebody that knew
something about everything.
AK: You had a lot of skills, highly skilled...
MF: Thats right. Somebody would sneak over to this place and drain
these big old transformers. Those had oil in them. The big coils,
resisters, whatever is down in there, they drained that oil out. And
it had a cooling effect or something. I don't know exactly what it
did, I'm not that familiar with it.
AK: Did it heat, overheat?
MF: Yeah. it absorbed the heat. They drained the oil out of it.
About two or three days it'd go whoosh! That whole damn thing would
blow up. And that would shut down, gosh, maybe a third of all the
electrical operated equipment they had in that place. There was
something like that going on all the time. But in the meantime we had
a lot of sick guys. We would, they knew they was sick, they would
come to work as long as somebody would help them out there. We had to
walk about two miles from our camp to work. If you didn't work they
cut your food half. And that was the worst thing that anybody in this
world could do. When you get sick cut your food, and that's what they
done. No production no food. They cut your rice half in two. It was
pretty hard to do. What they'd do in the mess hall said barracks
number such-and-such they got how many sick people and they had that
rice measured out and buddy thats what they'd put in the box. I mean
just the guys that's sick wadn't the ones that suffered, we all
suffered! Because no matter how many was sick everybody got the same
amount of rice see. I mean that was the only way we could do it. If
we'd of fed them just what they's supposed to get...
AK: They'd died eh?
MF: Yeah, they wouldn't have lived long.
AK: So all of you absorbed it. Whenever there was a sick person all of
you would absorb the shortness.
MF: Yeah.
AK: Just a cooperative effort.
MF: Yeah, I had, while in that camp I had, well I had, what they call,
beri-beri, well I don't know if it was beri-beri, my feet didn't swell
up but from my instep toward my toes my feet went dead. I mean it
just...
AK: No feeling?
MF: No feeling. I didn't have much control over my feet. I walked
kindly club footed or something like that. And the ends of my toes
was turning black. This Navy chief, my doctor told me I was getting
gangrene in my toes. The Japanese thought I was gold bricking and
they took me in that little old sick bay where they had their own
doctors see. They put my foot up on a, do you know what a charcoal
brazier, I don't know if you know what it is, it's a round crock pot
like with charcoal in there, they'd get the heat from that. They set
my foot up on the edge of that thing and it went shhhh! just like
burning flesh. Then took a big old long needle about that long and
run it all the way through my foot between my big toe and the next toe
to it. All the way through that. And I didn't have no pain
whatsoever. I didn't have any feelings in my toes. That was common
among all of us, just about everybody. This doctor Campbell (sp?) he
determined we wadn't getting enough food to have enough strength in
our heart to force the blood down into our toes. We also was getting
a tingling in our fingers, our hair quit growing, our teeth got loose,
our skin, you how fish is, it got scaly, our fingernails quit growing,
we got scurvy, thats when your ribs get completely raw, and all inside
your mouth and your tongue. The way they corrected that they give us
a lime. They'd issue everyone, I'd get a lime, you get one. You put
that thing in your mouth. Sit there and tears run out. You talk
about something burning, that acid in that lime. Believe it or not,
just one lime with that acid in that would clear all that up. It
would clear it up, clear up that scurvy in your mouth, your nose, your
tongue. It'd get so raw. The skin, you'd lose the skin off your
lips.
AK: How much food were you getting? What was your ration, your days
ration?
MF: I don't recall. You know, a cereal bowl, it'd be about that high.
I don't know whether I got a bowl in here to describe it. I forget
how many calories they called it, but I'd say a normal, a regular
cereal bowl. We'd get it, not packed, but a clumped bowl of rice and
about a half a cup of, about half a canteen cup of soup. It'd be a
variety of soy beans. That soup might be made out of watermellons,
cucumbers, sweet potatoes vines...
AK: Mostly water.
MF: Yeah. It might be made out of anything. Things like salt, boy we
craved salt, and oil, vegatable oil of anything. We didn't get any
vegatable oil. Thats why they said that our skin dried up like it
did. We'd get cut, we wouldn't bleed, they'd be water come out. We
didn't have pain, like I would now, because with the food and
everything our nervous system was just about dead I guess.
AK: Were you getting rice three times a day?
MF: Yeah. We's getting rice morning, noon, and night.
AK: Three of that bowl.
MF: Yeah.
AK: Just rice? Or would have some fish head in it occasionally or
something?
MF: Once in a while we'd get a little piece of beef, sometime we'd get
some fish...
<443>...<445>
AK: ...French, you were saying, you were talking about your food there
at Camp Tanagua.
MF: Yeah, like sometime we'd get fish, sometime we'd get little a
little pork. But this was far, say one time or twice a month. We'd
get small minnow fish, what'd you call them? Anchovies? They what
I'm thinking about?
AK: Could be.
MF: Little minnows?
AK: Yeah.
MF: Anyway, we used to get them sometime. One time we got a bunch of
them and they had ptomaine poisoning. Just about everybody in camp
come down with Ptomaine poisoning.
AK: On top of all these other things.
MF: Yeah. We had an old boy named Cutchback (sp?) from Missouri. He
was a draftee, he was in contruction, he was an engineer, a well
educated young man. One night I came in, I don't know why I didn't
eat any of those fish that day, but I didn't. I was serving them and
I think they run out. I didn't get any, or something, I don't know
what. But anyway, this boy was standing up there, and he said "old
ironside Cutchback!" and about 30 minutes he was bending over and it
had hit him. Wadn't nobody died from it but we had a lot of sick
people. That knucklehead, he was really smart, out there on the job
where we was at, he knew enough about the blueprints and stuff and
they didn't think anybody could understand their blueprints and stuff.
Well he done something to it, I didn't know, that was beyond, my
brain wouldn't figured it out anyway. But he done something to that
blueprint that another year or so we almost had that place finished.
And they come to find out it was about 30 feet to short. And he had
altered that blueprint on that drydock and thats when they moved us
out of that place. They got rid of the HoleyOes (sp?)!
AK: (Laughs) Thats enough of that eh?
MF: Thats right! I'm sure they figured out that somebody in that
group had goofed up or had messed up the blueprints. Because they had
a podium-like thing setting up there, a little shrine-like deal that
they kept the blueprints there. Anytime big shots come around they
could look at it and see what was going on. Old Cutchback (sp?), I
never was sure of that, but I'm almost positive that he got to that
blueprint and made some changes on it. We was organized in that camp.
We had people in there that could read Japanese and Reens (sp?) could
read and speak and write Japanese. Somebody during the week would
steal a newspaper and we pretty well kept up to date on how the war,
according to the Japanese, how the war was going. We got the Nippon
Times magazine. Like our Time magazine. This was the Nippon Times.
And it was all wrote in english. I don't think it was wrote up just
for us. Any english speaking Japanese or anybody else that spoke
english I guess would read it.
AK: Where'd you get it? Steal it?
MF: No, they give it to us, they give us that magazine. But the
newspaper, the Korean, see we worked with a lot of Koreans out there
because they had a lot of slave, well not slave, but forced labor from
Korea worked in this Dry Docks with us. We'd read, we'd find out how
the war was going on. If we had a Navy and Air Force and things like
they described in that Nippon Times, we had the biggest Army and Air
Force and Navy in the world. I don't know how many times they sunk
the same aircraft carrier, the battleship, the destroyers, and we kept
a running chart of how many times they sunk the Yorktown, how many
times they sunk that one. I think, the last I recall they'd sunk it
about six times. Same one. We got a big kick out of that. That
camp, we had a lot of hardships, we had a lot of guys that got sick.
We had a lot of guys that died from heart attacks. Beri-beri, some
guys get dysentery like this Elsie Anness (sp?). He got dysentery and
he went to work and he worked and worked and worked. He didn't want
to quit. About two or three days seemed like before he really died
his eyes set. Just looking straight ahead. He still was like a
zombie. He never batted his eyes or nothing. Me and this Lawson
tried to get him go on sick call and stay in and he wouldn't do it.
One night, the next morning he was deader than a doornail. That night
he died. We had a place in the barracks they called the zero ward
where 5 or 6 people die ever night. I had dysentery and went in that
place, a guy died over here one died over here, they'd bring in
somebody, he died, and he died and I stayed I don't know how long I
was in that place. Finally a corpman, a guy named Jolly (sp?) he said
"...hell French, if you ain't gonna die, I gonna try to get you well."
And the guy started getting me extra rice and soup and stuff like that
and I snapped out of it.
AK: When was this? What time?
MF: Its about, lets see, about February 1942, 43, about February 43.
AK: Shortly after you got there.
MF: Yeah. We hadn't been there, well November, December, January,
February... Yeah, we had an awful lot of people sick.
AK: You were on the zero ward for three days and this corpman said "if
you're not going to die I'm gonna get you out of there."
MF: "If you ain't gonna die I'm gonna try to help you." I don't know
how many people that come in there, them guys, some of them be
fighting over
AK: You mean guys on the death ward would be fighting, be swinging at
each other over the top of you?
MF: Yeah! Some guys, a little old stupid argument or something like
that, and then they'd be hitting over me trying to hit each other.
And they looked like two skeletons fighting each other. It was that
bad off. I looked like a skeleton to. I probably weighed, probably
weighed less than a hundred pounds at that time. I was really in bad
shape.
AK: Dysentery what put you there? Or was it ...
MF: Yeah, dysentery. I tell you dysentery drains your life fast. I'm
not kidding you. Anyway this guy Jolly (sp?) ...
AK: When you got that sulpha pill that time...
MF: Well that was in the Phillipines.
AK: That was before.
MF: Yeah. I don't know what it did to my system but just one sulpha
pill checked my diarrhea enough where I got my appetite back and
started eating and I was never was bother with any more until I got to
Japan. Then I got it there.
AK: Did they have any doctors there?
MF: Yeah, we had two doctors, but they didn't have any medicine. Very
little, very little medicine. This Doctor Campbell (sp?), well we had
another doctor, I can't recall his name, but he died on us. Our
doctor, he died. But Doctor Campbell (sp?) he was originally from
Cleveland, Ohio. He was a regular Army doctor. He took care of us.
He done amputations, took off arms and legs, and do appendicitis
operation, various other things without any anesthetic anything.
Appendicitis, get two or three guys on each side to hold you down,
he'd cut you open and take your appendix out. Then sew you back up.
And we never, I don't think that I can recall, that anybody every got
and infection. I cannot recall anybody that was operated on
appendicitis, you know how you're in the hospital where everything is
sterile, and everything is this, and everything is that. Well he
cleaned everything as clean as he could get it, knives and things that
he had to operate with, makeshift stuff, and he boiled them and
sterilized them as much as he possibly could. He'd cut you open, take
out your appendix, like you say, I don't know what kind of needles he
used or thread to sew you back up, but at that time I wadn't
interested, I didn't care one way or the other. But I don't ever, I
don't remember him losing anybody. He took off arms, he took off
legs. I had a jaw tooth pulled without anything to..
AK: deaden it?
MF: ...deaden it.
AK: Where was he from? Where's Captain Campbell (sp?) from?
MF: From Cleveland, Ohio. But after the war he come back and settled
in Los Angeles in a hospital out there. I take this Quan (sp?) and I
seen him in there about a year ago where he died.
AK: He did a lot of good medical work for you all?
MF: He said there wadn't enough years in medical school to get the
training that he got. And he done everything! It was either do it or
die. He said "what the heck, I ain't losing nothing, you're not losing
nothing either, if I can do it and you live we gain something, if you
die, you'd die anyway." He got liberated the same day. In fact he
come back on the same ship I did. He was OK. Dr. Campbell. Him and
a Navy chief they was the one that, when my feet was starting to get
gangrene in my toes, they started soaking me and a whole lot of other
guys, not just me. They'd take boiling water, as hot as they could,
it seemed like they'd just take it off the fire and set it and you'd
stick your feet in it. I don't know what it did but I know I got
feelings back in my feet, my toes. The gangrene disappeared, but I
still got touchy feet! You touch my feet and I'll go up the wall! A
whole lot of guys are like that. Arnold Lawson's (sp?) like that.
You can just sit over here and say "Let me see your foot!" He'd be out
of that chair.
AK: Tender eh?
MF: I don't know what it is about it...
AK: Nerve ends are
MF: That Dr. Campbell (sp?) like I say, he done everything. One time
I got hit with a sledge hammer. He cut my thumb open right up through
there and cleaned it out real good. He put something on it, I think
Sulphathizol (sp?) powder or something, bandaged that thing up, I went
to work the next day. Sometimes you can see a little scar there. But
I never did, I don't think it even bled when he cut it open, as well
as I can remember. I know I never felt, I just felt a little sting.
Other than that, that's about it. And pulling my jaw tooth out, it a
hurt a little bit. It was decayed. I had a filling in it. Somewhere
along the line that filling came out and it was starting to give me a
pain in the neck. And he....
<717>
End of Audio Tape 3 Side 1