[WW] Re: The Best Source of Storylines

[Michael Montesa <warhed@twics.com>]

LiveDaD@aol.com wrote:
>> Seek out your living history out there... Most of them are ready to talk and
>> are appreciative of a young ear who actually cares...

Amen to that. I don't need to look any further than my own living room (well, my parents living room anyway). My own father was in a civilian concentration camp in the Philippines (as opposed to a POW camp) from 1942 to 1945. He was living in Manila with his family before the war (grandpa was a politician). When the Japanese landed, he and his mother and two brothers hid out in a church for a couple of months until they felt their presence there was endangering the Catholic nuns who sheltered them. They turned themselves in to the Japanese.

My dad spent most of the war in that camp. He was 16 years old when he went in. I've only ever gotten him to talk about it in any depth on only one or two occasions, but he always had to stop because the memories are too painful for him. I did learn where he got his absolute sense of duty to his family from, and his determination. I heard stories of him trading cigarettes, razor blades, magazines, fruit that he'd grown under their hut. He told me about begging scraps of food off the Japanese. I imagine it must have looked something like the film "Empire of the Sun" although I will never be able to fathom just what he endured; starvation, humiliation, constant fear...(btw, read the book "Empire of the Sun" by J.G. Ballard, which is a masterpiece)

Near the end of the war, when food was runing low, and the fighting between MacArthur's troops and the Japanese was in full swing, the Japanese guards disappeared from the camp one day. The prisoners all stayed because they actually felt it was safer there, and there was some food at least. The Japanese were back the next day!

The Los Banos and Santo Tomas camps where he was held were liberated by the 11th Airborne division in a daring dawn raid. The paratroopers hit the camp with the help of some local guerillas, then moved all 1100 prisoners across a lake in amtracs (this was all behind enemy lines mind you). It was the most successful rescue operation of the war, and it was overshadowed by the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima on Feb 23, 1945.

Another granduncle fought on Guadalcanal with the Americal Division. He never talked about it to anyone. My mom later dug up his old service records and found out that he had received a bronze star during the fighting for Henderson field. She couldn't find the citation, but that particular fight was a tough one, and one doesn't get a bronze star for nothing...

That's just family. I've spoken to a lot of WW2 vets, including some Japanese veterans. I met this one old guy once who claimed to have been shot on Peliliu. He then proceeded to show me a set of rather convincing bullet scars on his legs. 

Another Japanese vet I met had both arms and one leg blown off when his destroyer was hit during the battle of the Philippine Sea. This bloke was a homeless guy who I often passed by outside Shinjuku station, and one day I just asked him out of curiosity. He'd sit there in his IJN uniform with his little tape player going with some Japanese martial music and try to bum yen off the generally oblivious passersby. I think some of the young Japanese who saw him every day probably didn't even know how he got that way. And this old guy  seemed happy to tell his story to me. 

Funny but the Japanese vets I've met usually seem thankful just to have survived and most said that Japan was completely wrong about what she did during the war, despite the official government's papering over of past transgressions.

Also met a guy who trained for the tokkotai, that is, he was going to be a kamikaze pilot, but the war ended before he shot his bolt. He told me that WW2 was when Japan collectively went insane. He said he wasn't sure if he could have flown his plane into an American ship either, but people were so fanatic and the government and social climate so oppressive, there was little else to do but go along.

Hmm, I could go on all day but I'll stop. At any rate, there are story sources all around you, probably many within your own family, all you have to do is look.




Mike

*----------------------------------------------------------*
*     "Show me a hero, and I'll prove he's a bum."         *
*     - Greg "Pappy" Boyington,                            *
*       Top scoring USMC fighter ace of WW2 -              *
*                                                          *
* warhed@twics.com ----------------------------------------*