The Camp
Speech given to the POWs as they entered Camp O'Donnel
"Your dominance of the orient is gone forever! We will fight you and fight you and fight you for 100 years, until you have been destroyed. It is regrettable that we were unable to kill each of you on the battlefield. It is only through our generosity that you are alive at all. We do not consider you to be prisoners of war. You are members of an inferior race, and we will treat you as we see fit. Whether you live or die is of no concern to us. If you violate any of the rules, you will be shot immediately. Your country has forgotten your name. Your loved ones no longer weep for you. You are forever the enemy of Japan."
Captain Tsuneyoshi, prison warden
Camp O'Donnell
Camp O'Donnell was an internment camp where the Japanese tortured the American and Filipino soldiers through neglect (little food, little water, and no medical treatment), to the point of death. Prisoners received a partial canteen of waterand a small amount of laguo, rice mixed with water to thinand a small amount of it out, once a day. Desperately the soldiers searched for rats, grasshoppers, and dogs to eat to supplement their daily rations. The sleeping quarters consisted of floorless bamboo "huts" and the men slept on bamboo bunks without blankets, matresses, or mosquito netting. The prisoners would be shot if they tried to run away or even get too close to the camp fence. They also had to bow respectfully to EVERY Japanese soldier they saw, from privates on up; if they did not the prisoners would get beaten horribly.
Most of the prisoners at O'Donnel were soon moved to a camp at Cabantuan and some were sent on ships to Japan or Japanese territories to work as slaves in factories or farms. At the end of the war only 7,000 scraggly, half-naked, sick, and starving troops remained in the prison camps.
The POWs celebrate the Fourth of July.
The following picture is the Oryoku Maru, one of the "hell ships" used to transport prisoners. The ships were barely seaworthy merchant vessels. The ships were hot, cramped, stank, and were often shot at by Allied planes and subs. A total of twenty-three ships sank. "That was where we lost most of our men," remembers survivor Frank Muther.
