But today I came across this story again, "World War II Rescue of Prison Ship Survivors" and it was as interesting as when I first linked to it in 2005--maybe more so as people psychologize a mass murderer at Ft. Hood, and weep for and provide free legal services for the detainees at Gitmo who are too vicious to be released either to their home countries or our prisons set up for run-of-the-mill criminals.
- Aside from having been in the water for four days without any food and practically nothing to drink, these men had been slaves in the Malay Peninsula for three years, since Singapore fell, and they themselves were in no darn physical shape to withstand any hardships, so our immediate problem was to get them below and get them in a bunk and give them some food. We did that - prepared some soup and broth for them - I remember that night we gave them some bread, it was the first white bread they had had in three years. We gave them some broth, warm water, tea, and they were still very active all that night - we finished recovering them just about dark, and all that night they were very active, talked, told us stories of how their ships had been sunk in a convoy, and how thankful they were, and about their life in the Army beforehand. But next morning, when we went down to look at them, boy, they were really tired out, there wasn’t a one of them rolling around a bit, it had been quite a mental strain and they keeled over completely.
The story they told us was that they, some of them, hadn’t even been in the Army two weeks and they were shot right up to Singapore to reinforce the garrison up there. After they got there, about three days, Singapore fell and they were taken prisoners, put up into various parts of the Malay Peninsula, and their most recent job had been to build a railroad down the Peninsula. They, all during this time, had suffered quite a few hardships. They had no food that they were used to at all, they had rice only. They had practically no medical care, they had no clothes, they all went barefooted. Everyone of them on board had malaria, most of them had pellagra, beriberi, bad cases of scurvy, and then they had salt-water sores on them that they got when they were in the water before being recovered. Our pharmacist’s mate was really faced with a problem, he had to make immediate inspection of all of them to find anybody who had serious injuries that he could fix up and then he had to slowly work through the rest of the crowd and fix up the little scratches and bruises and cuts and things like that, which he did. We were running sort of short of medical supplies too, I know, we didn’t have enough gauze or bandage to take care of these 73 men. About 10 or 12 cases were critical. We had to put them in bunks in the after battery with a special nursemaid - they were actual bad patients, where to others, boy, you should have seen them stacked up back there. We put two in each bunk and four in each torpedo rack in the after torpedo room and we were very profusely apologizing for the lack of space we had to offer them and they were very profusely saying, “That’s all right, you should have seen the space we’ve been living in,” because they said that they use to just stack them in the these troop-transports, everywhere they would go; when they would ride in trucks anywhere, they would just stack them in like bundles, and then didn’t mind this little space at all.
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