War Stories II by Oliver L. North Page A

like, those people were executed on the spot.
    The conditions at Camp O’Donnell were indescribable. We were assigned to certain barracks, and we found ourselves with a single water
pipe for 3,000 men. Men went without water even in that prison camp, many of them too weak or sick to wait in line for hours for a drink.
    We thought that when we got to O’Donnell that our lot in life had improved, only to find ourselves in the Black Hole of Calcutta. I was ordered to burial duty, and after a while you couldn’t even recognize the corpse you were taking out. So I could very easily have buried my friends and never known it.

    CORPORAL RALPH RODRIGUEZ, JR., US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942

    Before the surrender I packed my medic’s bag with a couple of bottles of paregoric and a good-sized bottle of iodine. And those are the two things that I used throughout the Death March. I put iodine in the water and the paregoric to give out because it numbs pain a little and helps if you have diarrhea. It also has alcohol in it, and it builds you up a little bit.
    I barely got through the areas where they stood you one against the other. I guess from lack of air or something, I passed out. A lot of the men hadn’t eaten for at least two, three days or more. You can’t march very far in a hundred degrees, much less half-starved. On the first night, there were some people ahead of us—the airfield was full of people. During the evening, late, we started coming across men who were sitting down or couldn’t move, or were lying down sick, asking for help. Right away the medics started to try to help them out, but as soon as you start helping them, here come the Japs with their bayonets.
    The Japanese struck the butt of the rifle in one man’s face, broke all his teeth and nose and everything. I saw the Japanese pursue one who got behind a fruit stand and he shot him, and then he came up cleaning his bayonet.

    One time they made us run—maybe because they were just mean. God was with us, for after making us run, they stopped us about two, three o’clock in the morning. We lay down alongside the road. I couldn’t find any comfortable spot to lie down, because it looked like a bunch of rocks. But the “rocks” happened to be turnips. And we all ate turnips. I ate my share of them after cleaning the dust off a little bit.

    PRIVATE ANDREW MILLER, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
June 1942

    After the surrender of Corregidor they put us on ships and took us across Manila Bay to a town called Maclarin, right outside the base where I started the war, at Nichols Field.
    Then they marched us the full length of Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison, the equivalent of Atlanta or Leavenworth. They herded us all in there. After a couple of days they started to take us out, 1,500 at a time, put us on trains, and took us to a town where we would stay overnight. The first four groups of 1,500 ended up at Cabanatuan Three, and there were 6,000 men there.
    The first four days of June 1942, the majority of the men from Camp O’Donnell were moved. That place was a mess. A lot of men died there.

    PRIVATE JOHN COOK, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942

    When we got to Camp O’Donnell there were around 200, 250 deaths a day. Filipinos and Americans were dying. They would put two bodies that were
so scrawny on one of the straight pole field stretchers, and they would carry it to the burial ground. They would dump them in the open pit.
    When I got to Camp O’Donnell most of us had malaria and beriberi. I didn’t know that we had diphtheria, dysentery, typhoid fever, and stuff like that. The sickest people had yellow jaundice, typhoid fever, or dysentery. They were so skinny it was pathetic and you thought they were about ready for their graves.
    One morning I had mess duty and was stirring the lugow pot—like a