American Valor Quarterly Issue 6 - Spring/Summer 2009 | Page 23

even look like they belonged to me. Doc got to giving me some sort
of brown powder. It seemed to get me to urinating and gradually
my swollen legs started down. He told me later it was Jap opium.
It seemed to stimulate my kidneys, and I gradually got better. Soon
I was back on the job, probably in August. The fleas got pretty bad
there, especially in extremely hot weather. Wasn’t long until my lower
leg got carbuncles on it. I might have been wrong, but I blamed it
on the fleabites. Well, I would go on sick call and Doc would pull
me in the M.I. room and lance one or two carbuncles each time. I
would get one day off work after that. He had no anesthetic so I
definitely didn’t do it just for the day off. This went on until my leg
from the knee to just below the ankle was lanced 26 times. About
half the scars are still there. About this time my beriberi or edema
had gone down; and it switched to dry beriberi, which was quite
painful. Edema is not painful, just clumsy and awkward. By this time
my weight without the swelling was below 100 pounds.
Around November 1, my right hip started swelling up. I worked a
few days yet, but it kept swelling. Then it got very painful. I showed
it to Doc, and back to the M.I. room I went. It was so bad that it
was at least twice as large as my left buttock. This is above the knee.
I always thought Doc was a little knife happy, but there was no
place to start cutting. After about two weeks, he did start. It was
far enough behind I could not see it. He and four or five Corpsmen
held me down with no anesthetic. I think he cut two or three inches
deep the first time and found nothing. He waited about two more
weeks, during which time I could not walk at all. The bedpan was
a battle itself. Of course, I only needed it about once every five
days. Then he found another place to cut close to the first one,
which was about half healed up. He did put sort of a wick in these
incisions also. So we went through the same thing again and found
nothing. Two days later, a man supposed to be Japanese doctor
came screaming through wanting to know why so many sick were
men and what the trouble was. Dr. Pizer uncovered me and told the
Jap doctor he didn’t know my trouble. The Jap doctor screamed in
Japanese, “You don’t cut deep enough. Let me show you.” The Jap
took the knife on the table, washed his hands, put on his coat, but
said nothing and eventually went out the door. If I owe my life to
anyone in Prison Camp, it was Captain Marvin I. Pizer.

days. The snow got to be 12 to 16 feet deep at one point. Scooping
snow came to be our main job that winter.
They had three large warehouses around this town, and all had tin
roofs. The snow would get heavy and cave them in, so our job was
to clear them off. Coal came into the furnaces by rail. We unloaded
these cars onto a conveyor belt by hand. The belt took it up into
large coal bins. Then we scooped the cars full of snow. When we
got so many cars loaded with snow, they brought in a steam engine.
We all got aboard, and they hauled it out over to a bay about two
miles away. There we scooped the snow into the water.
In Japan we never drank cold water. Every work job had its own
iron pot. They started a wood fire under it every morning, let it boil
for a while, and then left a little fire under it all day.
During these days Dr. Pizer gave me a ration of this opium every
morning. This seemed to keep my kidneys working. If I didn’t take
it, I could not urinate in the daytime, then at night it was every 45
minutes. Sometimes I would be so tired I could not wake up. Bed
wetting was the probably the cause of my pneumonia. Doc said we
couldn’t take chances because I would never live through another
case of pneumonia. He also said he didn’t know what would happen
when, if ever, we would get back to the States. Somehow they did
get a scale in the M. I. room. It registered in kilos; but by translating
it, I figured out that by this time I weighed 91 pounds.
This camp also had a community type bath, which is quite common
in Japan. This was a wooden tank about 5 ft. wide and 10 ft. long
and 4 ft. deep. They had a fire somewhere around it and it was
steam heated. The water seemed to circulate some. They started
it up once a month in winter and twice a month in summer. They
kept it hot for 24 hours. By that time all 550 of us were supposed
to have had time to go through it. That was a chance to get thawed
out. It even made the beriberi feel better.

Around the latter part of April it was time to go back up the
mountain to the quarry. The snow was mostly gone. The rock quarry
had been closed all winter on account of snow. The quarry and our
camp were located by a swift mountain stream of water. It was not
deep but about 150 to 200 ft. wide. They had sort of a pit into which
I laid for days on my belly. I really had no pain, except if I tried to we dumped the dirt and rock into. The swift current washed the
move. The bedpan was the pain, and I couldn’t maneuver myself. dirt out and the rock came out the conveyor belt all washed clean;
I had to have help. This went along until about January, 1945, then then the Japs hauled it to the smelting furnaces.
while in the M.I. room I got pneumonia the third time. I ran a high
fever for days but finally it broke. Doc told me I could never live About the middle of May of 1945, I had a return of the jaundice.
through it one more time.
My eyeballs turned yellow and my urine got thick and brown. I
told Doc and he gave me a few days off. I forgot the treatment,
After this last bout of pneumonia, my hip started going down, but it was not much! But somehow I pulled through again. After
and never did have any drainage. Around mid-February the doctor we were in this camp at least six months, we heard an occasional
decided to get me up. I never realized how bad a s