About 6:00 am the next day we were underway again, only this time on foot. We all were told to fill our canteens because it would be a long and dry walk (20 kilometers). We started on time but they wouldn’t let us step out and hit a natural stride. They made us walk slowly. We had our packs on and it wasn’t only a few hours till they felt as if they weighed 500 pounds. The sun was hot as hades and it just seemed as though we had walked for hours. Men began passing out from heat and exhaustion and they would put up a stick with a small white flag on it and later a truck would pick them up. Some of them died where they lay. My head was beginning to buzz and I began to get dizzy. My canteen was practically empty, due to the fact that two of us were drinking from it and before I reached our camp my tongue was hanging out almost a foot.

In the following months we ate much rice and damn little of anything else. It wasn’t long till beri-beri and scurvy broke out. Many died and are now lying in unmarked graves. Some were beaten to death!

Later they sent out a 1200 man detail from our camp and 900 from camp 1. We were told we were going to Japan, but we didn’t. It was 38 degrees below zero the night we arrived in Mukden, Manchuria. Everyone’s blood was thinned after being in the tropics and coming into sub-zero weather like that was damned hard to take. We had no socks, just bare feet in G.I. shoes, and no hats, or gloves.

I spent most of the first winter in the camp hospital with a bad case of diarrhea and a mild case of beri-beri and scurvy. I look back and shake with horror at the things we ate to keep alive. I had weighed only 94 pounds and now I was discharged on light duty nearly six months later. All during the past month a great many men had been beaten with clubs, clapped and kicked around. Three men were shot for trying to escape. Two marines and one sailor.

In the spring of ’43 we took all the dead bodies out of the warehouse where they were stored; piled up like cord wood. We chipped large holes in the ground, big enough to hold 19 men each and held our mass funeral. We buried about 225 men who had passed away the first winter. It was tough going.

On the 17th of August, Major General Parker called the camp together and told them officially that the war was over. You could have heard the yell that went up all the way to Frisco. On September 14, we boarded the train for Dairen and embarked on the A.P. Colbert; off Okinawa we rode out a typhoon, and as the storm subsided we ran into a mine and it hit at the engine room killing two there and one X-POW on deck. A tug towed us to Okinawa and we were taken ashore and given new clothing, a bath, and good chow. The next morning we embarked on the hospital ship Rixie for Guam. There we embarked again, this time on the A.P. U.S.S. Catron. Twelve days later we sailed through the Golden Gate. The Bridge looked like the Pearly Gates to us. Coming home to America was just like going to heaven. I didn’t realize the U.S. had so much of everything. It’s by far the grandest country in the world.

Well, Skipper, I hope this big long letter didn’t tire you all out. There are a great many more things I could have written about this, but this is a book already.

Goodbye for now and I hope and pray that this letter finds you, your wife and family well and happy.

Respectfully yours,
Arthur D. Emard

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