Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Paul David Phillips was digitized.
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This interview is being held with Paul David Phillips. Paul was born March 9, 1918. He joined the Army in 1936, and retired after nearly thirty years with the rank of Brigadier General. The interview is taking place on March 13, 2009, at Paul's home in Douglas County. The interviewer is Joe Clements, a volunteer for the Library of Congress project. Paul, let's begin with a little background information. Where were you born and tell us a little bit about your childhood.
Well, I was born in Denver, in a house, which was normal for those times. I went to the usual schooling, public schooling. I went to Edison Grammar School. Skinner Junior High School and North High School, and from there I went to the University of Denver on a half scholarship for one year. Toward the end of that year, I took the examination for West Point, and it turned out that, although I didn't qualify fully for the vacancy that was available for the Representative that I took the exam from, I was fully qualified to enter West Point, and a Democratic congressman--I'd taken a Republican's exam--asked me if I would accept his appointment. That was Senator Costigan of Colorado, and so I entered West Point on the 1st of July of 1936.
That's interesting. Who were your parents? What was your father's occupation? Did your mother work outside the home?
My mother never worked outside of the home. Her maiden name was Josephine Scureman. My father was Floyd E. Phillips, and he worked almost his whole life with the Great Western Sugar Company.
Did you have brothers and sisters?
I had one sister, three years younger than I.
Were you involved in athletics at all in high school?
I wasn't because I worked. I worked at the Bureau of Biological Survey in the Customs House in downtown Denver, taking care of their experimental animals, mostly white rats. What they were developing was poison for the farmers in the west to keep down coyotes and porcupines and that sort of thing.
So, you went off to West Point then. When was that?
I reported there on the 1st of July of '36 [1936].
Tell us about that experience.
Well, I could take ten minutes telling you just about the first day, but it was a great shock to find out how I was going to stand and eat and dress and be disciplined, especially that first year. It was a very tough year, and there were several times early on when I wondered whether or not I'd made the right decision. I persisted and got through that first year all right, although one of my roommates did not, for academic reasons, but it was a really, really tough year. Then, of course, I went on for the next three years, which were considerably easier. Got a fine education in discipline, in academics, and morally. I graduated on the fifteenth, on the eleventh of June of 1940.
At West Point, was everything military? Was your education all military or did you choose a course of study? How did that work?
West Point, at that time, was basically a college like any other engineering college, and the courses were all prescribed. At that time, there were no courses that one could elect. There were no options whatever. You took mathematics pretty much all the time, all four years. Engineering, you had English for two years, you had French for two years, Spanish for one year, Military Hygiene, Ordinance and Physics, Chemistry. Then, the afternoons were devoted to parades and Saturday to inspections. There was a lot of marching, and then we did have some tactical exercises. We learned about the Infantry and the Artillery, but not in any very deep way. We were required to stay there, without leaving the post except to go to football games when the whole corps went. We were not allowed to leave the post until eighteen months. We were allowed nine days at Christmas after we'd been there a year and a half, and each Christmas thereafter. After the second year, we were allowed the summer vacation at home. Other than that, there were no leaves.
So, what were your reasons to apply to a military academy, and did West Point meet those expectations?
The reason I applied had nothing to do with my wanting to be in the Army. At D. U. [University of Denver], on my first year, I was able to do all my classes in the morning, go to work in the afternoon, and I knew that wasn't going to continue. So, I knew I wasn't going to be able to afford to continue working toward a chemical engineer degree, so I applied at a place that I'd heard had a great academic atmosphere. Once you get there, you find out that there's a system, not intentional perhaps, but you're taught by West Pointers, you see West Pointers, the tactical officers are West Pointers, and by the time you get out, you're so imbued with wanting to be in the Army, that you, at that time, they didn't even need a requirement for you to stay in the Army, as they do today. So, everybody in my class, who was physically capable, and only one wasn't, accepted the commission as a second lieutenant. It was just the thing to do.
So, you were there on September 1st, 1939, when Hitler marched into Poland.
Yes.
What, how did you hear about that and what were the, what was your reaction and the reaction of your classmates?
Well, it varied, naturally. There were 450 in my class, and so the reaction differed, of course. There were those, and they were mostly people that had grown up in the Army, that thought it was going to be a great opportunity for promotion because up to that time, promotion had been very, very slow. We had people who had been in the Army fifteen years who were still first lieutenants. So, there was that side of it. There were people who thought, "Boy, here's opportunity." There were others of us, especially on June 15th of '40 [1940] when Paris fell, that were very distressed about the whole thing and knew that we were going to get in it sooner or later.
That's how you felt?
That's how I felt, yes.
What happened after graduation?
Well, I had been dating a girl from Baltimore for two years, and we had become engaged, and we were married very shortly thereafter. In fact, on the 15th of June of 1940, in Baltimore, her name was Rita Anne Ruzicka, and her father was a doctor. Her mother was a homemaker. She had a brother, two brothers and a sister. We left then. We were supposed to have three months leave. We came to Colorado for our honeymoon, and spent it up in a little place called Glenhaven, Colorado near Estes Park. While we were there, we got a message telling us that our graduation leave would be cut short, that we were to report to Fort Sill early in August to take the Basic Officers course, and that we would not ship to the Philippines, a place we agreed it would be very nice to go to, until later, and we would ship not from New York but from San Francisco. So, that's exactly what we did. We had to drive back to Baltimore, back to Fort Sill, took the course, and finally sailed for the Philippines.
So, Fort Sill is located --
Fort Sill is in Oklahoma, not quite fifty miles north of the Texas border, and it's the home of the Army Artillery School.
What did you do there?
We took the basic course, which was about three months, where we learned all of the basic things that a second lieutenant or a first lieutenant or a company battery commander, captain, needed to know about the artillery, which included marching, the duties of a forward observer, the duty of a safety officer, all of the soldierly duties that had to do with running mess halls and that sort of thing. Surveying, and the whole school of fire.
So, before we leave for the Philippines, let's talk a little bit more about just your introduction into the military, the changes from civilian life. The food, the rigor, the physical rigor of training. How was that? What do you recall about that?
Well, of course, most of that took place at West Point. The mess hall at West Point is huge. At that time, it was able to accommodate at one sitting the whole corps, and that first year, the plebes [freshmen] sit at a stiff brace on the front edge of their chair. The food was served family style. It was always delicious, I thought, and the plebes served the upper classmen. We ate at ten-man tables, each of which had three plebes, freshmen, who served the water, who served all the drinks, who carved the meat, who counted the number of prunes there might be at breakfast so that they could be divided equitably, and that sort of thing. So, the food was wonderful. The discipline was something one had to get used to because we marched to every formation. We marched to meals, three meals a day. We marched to class. We marched to chapel, which was mandatory, and, at that time, you had your choice of protestant or catholic--nothing else. If you were Jewish, you had your choice of those two. We had summer camp at the end, at the beginning of that year and again at the end of that year, where we lived in four-man wall [?] tents all summer long. We paraded every afternoon and other afternoons, before parade, we'd have athletics of all kinds. It was General MacArthur who established the intramural program there. We had gymnasium there where we learned fencing, boxing, wrestling, swimming, gymnasium on the parallel bars and the horizontal bars, so it was a very stiff program, and there was very little time to do anything that you wanted to do. By the way, at that time, even radios were forbidden.
How was Fort Sill different?
Well, we were treated as junior officers. It was very different than West Point, of course, because a few of us were married. We lived in town. We commuted to the post to school, which was all day long. At that time, we had Equitation every afternoon for two hours and again on Saturday. So, it was regular classroom work in that sense, was very like West Point, but there were no physical requirements other than the Equitation program.
Equitation. Explain that.
That's horsemanship.
What was involved?
What was involved was riding, cross-country, learning to jump. At West Point, it was, from the very beginning, because a lot of people had never ridden before they went to West Point. It was there about five times every two weeks that we rode for about two hours in a big riding hall. We just learned all we could about horses and horsemanship.
So, how did you get from Fort Sill to the Philippines?
Well, I had bought an automobile upon graduation. By the way, cadets are paid, kind of a minimum wage, and part of that was set aside for graduation, to buy one's uniforms and to buy some form of transportation. From the stipend that cadets got, they did pay for the food they ate. There was a "mess" bill. So, I had bought a Chevrolet business coupe. Cost all of $605, and I can even remember the color of it. It was Folkstone grey. We drove that to San Francisco. It was eventually shipped to the Philippines. We went to the Philippines on an Army transport, known as the U.S. Army Transport Grant, named after Ulysses Grant, of course. It was a ship that had been built in Bremen, Germany, I think in 1903, for the run to Brazil. So, it was basically built for the tropics, and I must tell you that there was no running water in any of the rooms. There was no fresh water for showers. All the showers were taken in a huge room on schedule, men at one time, women at another, and a steward brought one a single bucket of fresh water for rinsing. Of course, one had to have a special kind of soap to be able to take a shower in salt water. About three days out of Hawaii, before we got there, we heard a loud bang and thought we'd been attacked by a Jap submarine. What actually happened was one of the boilers had blown out on this old ship which had a top speed of about twelve knots. So, we lay over in Hawaii for about five days, and that was a great time because we got to see the, we got to learn all about Oahu from our classmates who were stationed there. It really was too short a time because eventually we got back on the ship and did get to Manila.
When was this?
That would have been very early in 1941, toward the end of January in '41 [1941].
So, there was concern about Japanese at that time?
There was, yes. You know, the Japanese had long ago invaded China. We knew there were talks going on between our country and Japan. We knew they weren't going terribly well. There were rumors on the ship that all of the dependants on the ship, would remain on it, turn right around and go back home. That, in fact, did not happen, but the ship we went on, the Grant, in fact, did evacuate dependants from the Philippines, leaving the husbands there.
So, your wife was actually with you on this trip?
She was.
Was that usual? That dependants were transported with their military --?
Oh, yes. It was very normal. Remember now. There were only a few overseas stations at that time. There was Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal, Hawaii, Alaska, Philippines. The Army had a system of Army transports, ocean-going vessels of about fifteen thousand tons each that transported both the officer and his family.
So, when you arrived in Manila in early 1941, what was your first assignment?
I was in the Artillery, which I had chosen upon graduation from West Point, and so my post was fifty-seven miles north of Manila at a place called Fort Stotsenberg. Officers there had been assigned to be host and their wives hostesses to new arrivals, so I was welcomed by an officer and his wife from the class ahead of me, the class of 1939 from West Point, a chap by the name of Kenneth Griffith from Kansas City. They welcomed us to the post. They had already arranged for us to have a houseboy, whom they had hired for us, and a lavandera, that's a laundress, because we changed our uniforms twice a day while we were there. They carried us around the post when we needed to go places up until the time our car arrived. I was put in the 24th Field Artillery regiment there. On that post, there was also the 23rd Cavalry and the 26th Pack Cavalry, Pack Artillery [23rd Pack Artillery and 26th Cavalry]. So, I was a junior officer in a battery in this regiment, which was armed with British seventy-five millimeter guns, a relic of World War II and shortly thereafter.
World War I.
World War I, excuse me.
So, were you in training at that point or were you manning the defenses of that area of the Philippines?
We were in training, yes. These, the troops were all Filipinos. They were Philippine scouts, and I don't think the U.S. [United States] has ever had any better soldiers. There was no need to recruit for the Philippine scouts. In fact, it was such a desirable position that anyone who wanted to join generally served at least a year doing menial jobs around a battery, such as cutting hair, doing KP [kitchen police] and the like, to find out whether or not the rest of the battery thought he was qualified to be a Philippine scout. They were just marvelous soldiers. So, yes, we were training as Artillery would train in the United States. Went on marches, did for the officers, practicing the adjustment of fire and that sort of thing.
You did that throughout 1941?
Well, of course, the war started out there on the 8th of December. No, actually, that post saw the expansion of the Artillery by the addition of what would have been two more regiments of Artillery, the 88th and the 86th. So, recruitment went forward for those. I was given a battery of my own some time in the middle of that year of American seventy-five millimeter guns, again relics of World War I, and not very impressive weapons, actually. We started training new recruits to be Artillerymen, and then a large number of officers, reserve officers for the most part, were ordered to the Philippines and started to arrive. Most all of them, of course, were senior to me. So, I lost that battery to a captain, and I became his lieutenant in the battery. That didn't please me much, and I decided that if I wasn't going to be able to command, maybe I should hunt for another job. It was about that time, a little later, maybe in August, that General Frederick Sharp came to our post presumably to be the replacement for the colonel who was there, but instead that colonel was ordered to stay, and General Sharp was given command of the Visayan-Mindanao force. This was a force that was created by General MacArthur primarily for the mobilization and training of divisions of the Philippine Army. I met General Sharp. He seemed to take a liking to me, so at the appropriate time, I finagled a job in his headquarters which was in Cebu City on the island of Cebu in the central Philippine Islands.
What job was that?
Well, I was made the Secretary of the General Staff, and that's a job through which the papers that the General is going to read pass. In other words, if the Personnel man or the Intelligence person or the Plans person or whatever section, proposes a piece of paper on which a decision is required, that paper is first reviewed by the Secretary of the General Staff, and then passes on for the general to read. So, that was my job, and in addition to that, he said he wanted me to be his aide-de-camp, so I was that as well.
What did that entail?
Well, that entailed traveling with him whenever he went to make a visit, taking notes of things that he wanted noted for future decisions or consideration. Generally, just being a clerk to him. That was on the island of Cebu, and that was shortly before the war started. That was in, probably, November of 1941.
What was your off-duty life like? You had your wife there.
Before I went to Cebu, she had been evacuated. I had a child born on the 1st of May of 1941 in Sternberg Hospital in Manila, a hospital that was destroyed by our Artillery when we went back during the re-capture of Manila. When that baby was about three months old, they were evacuated along with a lot of other families from Fort Stotsenberg, through Manila, then on home. So, I was alone. We had a mess hall, of course. Our headquarters, actually, were in a Spanish fort that had been begun by the Spanish in 1538 on the island of Cebu. We had to rehab [rehabilitate] it somewhat, obviously, for us to live in it. We had both our quarters there and our offices. There was an American civilian population there because it was a busy port. There were people that ran that port, including Americans. There was other commerce there. There was a large Spanish influence there because that's where the Spanish first went when they went to the Philippines. The social life consisted of once in awhile being asked out to dinner to one of these American homes.
What were you told about the reason why your family had to be evacuated?
Oh, we knew it was just for their safety because we knew that the chances of war were getting closer and closer. We had no idea, of course, that the Japanese would attack the Philippines. There was every possibility that the would bypass the Philippines and go to the Dutch East Indies instead or go to Hong Kong or Singapore instead. But, of course, they chose to take out the Philippines as well.
Did you hear about, I know there's just a few hours in between, but did you hear about the attack on Pearl Harbor before the Japanese invaded the Philippines?
Oh, yes. Yes, we knew about the attack. It was, of course, not the 7th of December there but the 8th, because we were on the other side of the International Dateline, but we knew about it very shortly after it happened. It wasn't, I believe, until the next day when our aircraft on Clark Field came back to re-fuel at noontime, that the Japanese attacked them. They did not attack Mindanao where we were until May, but in December they, in fact, went into Davao on the southern part of Mindanao because it was a largely Japanese city, very large Japanese population there. It was undefended, and they simply took the town, established a perimeter around it, and sat there until May when they, in conjunction with an attack on the north shore, also started to attack.
So, when you heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, what were the immediate orders that went out at that point?
We had been warned, as had the commanders in Hawaii, that war was imminent, and we were on full alert. We had posted guards at our airports round the clock. We had no lights showing after dark in our headquarters, so we were simply told to prepare for an invasion at any time. Of course, that came on Luzon, I believe, on the 20th of December of '41 [1941], but not where we were. It was shortly after that, in January of '42 [1942], that General Sharp was ordered to move his headquarters to Mindanao because we had a bomber base that had been built there, capable of landing B-17s, B-25s. The headquarters did move to Mindanao at that time.
Did you actually come under fire on Mindanao?
Yes. The Japs landed, the Japanese landed on the north shore of Mindanao in early May, and General Sharp sent me out to command the Artillery. Now, the Artillery we had was even more ancient than the 24th Field Artillery Regiment. What I had was three Maxim-Vickers, model 1898, 2.95-inch mountain howitzers. These were mountain guns, not howitzers, guns. These were meant to be carried on four mules. They could be broken down and carried almost anywhere on mules. I had about nine hundred rounds of ammunition for them. They were on wooden wheels with iron rims. They had a very basic recoil system, consisting of a huge spring in oil, nothing modern. They had a muzzle velocity of only about six hundred foot seconds and a range of about five thousand yards. So, I had three of those, and I had one modern 81-millimeter mortar that had been destined for Bataan, but the ship captain refused to go there after the Japanese blockaded Manila Harbor, and so I had that with some rounds of ammunition. So, General Sharp sent me out with that, and I had a prepared position overlooking the first escarpment from the beach, and when the Japanese started up that, I stayed there all day surrounded by poorly trained Philippine Army units under the command of American colonels. Many of these people had never fired their rifle before they saw the Japanese. These were Enfield rifles, model 1917, and the extractor on them was very brittle, broke quite often. Quite accidentally, I started a fire with some rounds of shrapnel which I was firing. Now, a shrapnel round is not manufactured anymore, but it's a round that has a matrix of small balls that is intended to be exploded over the enemy and then shower down on them from a distance of about twenty yards. Quite accidentally, I started a fire of the grass that grows in the Philippines called kogan grass. This grass grows to a height of nearly twelve feet, and when it gets dry, it's very flammable. This fire, for some reason, burned down hill and chased the Japs away for all of that day, and for that action and for holding them off for that day, I was later awarded the Silver Star. Yes, we were fired on by their artillery. We even, that night, were infiltrated by Japanese and subjected to a lot of small arms fire though we were in foxholes, so most of it was over our heads.
What were your emotions at the time?
I was scared to death. [Phillips chuckles] That's the kind of situation where you wonder whether you're going to get out alive or not because it's fairly clear that your side is not as well-trained or equipped as the other side is. What you're faced with is withdrawal action, which we were. In fact, our fight only lasted, I don't know, six days or so, I think, before General Sharp was forced to surrender. Now, there's an interesting story in connection with that. He had been released by General Wainwright, who was in command after General MacArthur left the islands in March of '42 [1942]. General Wainwright, on Corregidor, had been over-run and was forced to surrender. Before he did so, he released General Sharp to his own devices and told him to do the best he could to hold the airfields on Mindanao. When General Sharp was over-run, as I've just described, he did the same thing to the island commanders under him. He was on Mindanao, but there was Cebu, there was Samar and Leyte. There was Negros and Panay. Well, General Homma, the Japanese commander wasn't having any of that. So, he had in the tunnel, Malinta Tunnel it's called, on Corregidor, something between nine and eleven thousand American prisoners. He sent, under Japanese aegis, to meet with General Sharp an American colonel who spoke Japanese. He convinced General Sharp that unless he did come back and surrender the forces, his own and those under him, those Americans were in great danger of being slaughtered. General Sharp was convinced that that was not an idle threat. So, he did his best by radio to call these commanders back, and they all replied that might be treasonable. "You're under Japanese authority now, and so we're not going to surrender." General Sharp designated four of the officers on his staff, I among them, to go with the Japanese to Cebu which they had, at least had conquered the city, though not the whole island. We flew there in a DC-3 with a Japanese pilot, and I was put on a banca [bangka], which is a large outrigger canoe that the Filipinos use for fishing, that had a sail and an outboard motor, and I had with me a Japanese piece of paper that said what I was about to do and don't harm this person. But, I also had a paper that General Sharp had given me on Mindanao which was addressed to the Colonel on the island where I was going that asked him to sign it, saying he understood and would obey the order to surrender, which I was to take back to General Sharp after he had signed it, of course. Overnight, I took this canoe trip from Cebu over to the island of Leyte, which is, of course, where General MacArthur landed when he came back to free the Philippines. I commandeered a vehicle and went over to Tacloban, which is the capitol, and I contacted a Colonel Scudder [sp?] who was the commander, no, that's wrong, Colonel Cornell [sp?] was the commander there. I had never met him, nor he I. I showed him the paper, and he said, "Well, I don't think I'm going to do this, because," he said, "You know, in the Philippine insurrection, the last people who surrendered were these people on Leyte and Samar." I pointed out to him he had no artillery. He had a limited amount of ammunition and food. I think what finally convinced him was this group of Americans in the tunnel at Corregidor. So, he finally signed this paper, which I was then to take back with his liaison officer to Cebu so that the Japs could land peacefully. Now, ironically, while I was there, a group of Americans, some civilian, some military, had found a five hundred ton vessel, of which there are many in the inner islands there, that they had loaded with fuel and food, and they were going to make a run for Australia. They invited me to join them, but I had this piece of paper that I had to take back to my General, so I turned them down. The first people I met when I got to San Francisco, at the Top of the Mark, the very first night there, were about half of that group to welcome us home. So, they made it. I did one other thing while I was there. With all the money I had, and I had some Philippine pesos, I found a Chinese store that had a lot of athletic gear in it that I thought might be very useful in prison camp. So, I bought what I could afford in softballs and bats. I got a volleyball and a volleyball net. I wrapped that in the Army blanket I was carrying with me, and I carried that all the way back to Mindanao, and we found that very useful for a number of days. Well, when we got back to Cebu, when I got back to Cebu and all the others had accomplished their mission, we thought we'd be taken right back to Mindanao, and every day we saw the plane going from Luzon overhead that we thought one day would stop and pick us up. Never did. Finally, we were put on a freighter that had a bunch of Japanese troops and a bunch of comfort girls on it. We went back to Mindanao, but we were landed in Cotobato, which is way over on the southwest part of the island. From there, we were transported by truck over a period of four or five days, having to do KP work for the Japanese and whatever else they asked us. We finally returned to camp, and General Sharp had heard that we had all been killed, so he wasn't expecting his little paper back at all. Now, very soon after that, all the full colonels and generals from all over the Philippines were taken to Japan, and that left the highest ranking officers amongst the prisoners were the lieutenant colonels. Life -- [pause in recording]
You mentioned "comfort girls." What were they and were they there for your comfort?
No. I know very little about them, but it was obvious they were there for the Japanese soldiers being taken down, and I read later, recently, in fact, about Korean girls that were pressed into prostitution for the comfort of Japanese, and I'm sure that's what they were for.
Before we get up to your time as a prisoner, I want to go back just a little bit.
Sure.
What was your personal experience when you realized that was the end? Were you personally confronted with Japanese at that point, or did the general just say, you know, how did all that happen? Personally.
Yeah. Personally, I was happy to stop being shot at. It was a great relief not to be shot at by artillery and small arms fire, and it was a great comfort to me to go to the back and get a decent meal, but, of course, when realization set in, none of us thought it was going to take very long for the American forces to get there. We learned soon enough that the attack on Pearl Harbor, which we only knew had happened, in fact was so damaging to our fleet because the plan was, of course, that we were only required to hold out on the Philippines for six weeks, at which time it was expected that if the Japanese were ever silly enough to attack there, the American forces would return within six weeks and drive them away. We had no idea we were going to be in prison camp for well over three years. We thought, you know, a year [unclear]. We were all still pretty optimistic.
Physically, what happened to you, though? How did your captivity transpire from, you know, being part of the General Staff and then, all of a sudden, I mean, how did you then become, personally, a prisoner of war?
We were simply ordered to go to a place in Mindanao called Malaybalay, which was a town near which was the mobilization camp made of Nipa shacks of all kinds, mess halls, living quarters for the 101st Philippine Army. That's where we were ordered, both Americans and Filipinos, to go. We went there. Aside from mounting a perimeter guard, the Japanese did not come into camp. We took with us a lot of canned goods. We took with us quite a bit of money. There was nearby a large cattle ranch. So, for those first few months, we lived quite well. We played softball every afternoon. We did not work. We gambled at night. We played bridge all day long, if we wanted. That didn't last very long. Within a few months, they then trucked us up to the north shore, put us on ships and sent us around to a farm prison camp near Davao in the southern part of Mindanao. This had been a camp, of course, run by the Philippine government for their own prisoners, who had been cleared out. It was self-sufficient in the sense that it had large areas of rice paddies. It had a fish farm. It had a sawmill. It had orchards of tropical fruits, and that's where they put us. Now, we didn't get the fruit, except what we stole, and the bulk of our time was filled with learning all about rice culture. And so we spent our days in rice paddies, mostly in thigh-high mud, learning to plant rice, to weed rice, to harvest rice, the whole bit. We ate rice three times a day, sometimes with a thin gruel that had a fish head or two in it. Usually though, with a purple sweet potato that they call a kamote over there. From there, after a little over two years, we were all shipped to Luzon and to the Camp Cabanatuan, where many Americans were in prison already. We were there a few months doing make-work, and from there we were shipped to Bilibid, with the clear intention on the part of the Japanese to send us somewhere else. I sat through, I think, nineteen air raids by the American forces because they were back in force. There, on the eleventh of December of 1944, there were 1,619 of us put on a ship called the Oryoku Maru because our air force, our Navy air, had stopped the air raids for a few days. They went off to fight a battle somewhere else. We sailed from there early on the morning of the 12th of December. On the 14th and 15th, we were bombed by our Navy. Navy dive-bombers in Subic Bay, which had been a U.S. Naval Base. A lot of people were killed in that. The conditions in the ship were beyond description. People were murdered by berserk Americans, lacking any water, lacking any food, dying of thirst. When they let us abandon ship, they put us in a tennis court, fed us a few tablespoons of uncooked rice every day. Finally, we were shipped by train to Lingayen Gulf, which is where the Japs had originally landed, and where MacArthur eventually came back and landed when he attacked Luzon. We were shipped out of there on Christmas morning of 1944 on a second ship. That ship was tied up in Takao Harbor, Formosa, over the Japanese birthday on the 1st of January, 1945, was tied to another ship that was attacked by our Air Force and made un-seaworthy. Finally, we were put on a third ship. We arrived in a snowstorm in Japan in the hold of a ship on the 29th of January of 1945. Of those who left, 1,619, the best estimate is there were 450 left. All the rest having died or been killed en route. Of those 450, another estimated 171 died, so something like 270 are all that were remaining of that group when the American rescue came. We stayed in Japan until the 29th of April, which happened to be the Emperor's birthday, is why I remember that date. We were shipped then by ferry over to Pusan in Korea, put on a train and shipped to Mukden, Manchuria, to a prison camp just outside of Mukden, that had been going for a number of years. There, we joined up with some British and Dutch officers and enlisted men, who'd been there some time. They were working in mines. We did not work there, but our menu changed from rice to some kind of a soybean cake, one a day, with liquids. We had plenty of liquids there. We were rescued some time in mid-August after the atomic bombs had been dropped and the Japanese had surrendered, the first group in was a five-man team of OSS [Office of Strategic Services], ironically led by a West Point classmate of mine by the name of Hennessey. That group had been sent, actually, to rescue General Wainwright, who wasn't there, but they found him and he was able to be rescued and able to be aboard the Missouri [U.S.S. Missouri] when the Jap surrender came on the 2nd of September. Ironically also, I have met one of those five men who lives in Golden, Colorado now, a chap named Hal Leith, who was an enlisted man at the time. Of course, I didn't know him or he me. We were some two thousand in that camp, and I was evacuated there by air after my General Sharp, who had been with Wainwright. I got to China. He ordered that I be on the next plane out, so I was evacuated first to Xian, China, then Kunming, China, where I went to a hospital and they discovered a spot on my lung. Then, to the Philippines where we were re-outfitted with American officer uniforms, promoted one rank, given our medals and ribbons and fed all day long, 24 hours a day if we wanted. Then, on to Honolulu for a reception, then on to San Francisco, and finally, by the way is where my father met me, then on to Denver, where my wife and daughter, having heard of the surrender, arrived from Baltimore shortly before I got home.
I want to come back to that, but before we do that, let's go back to your time as a POW [prisoner of war]. You were moved a lot of places over a relatively short period of time, and you've talked about the food that you had and how it changed. What was morale like within the camps?
Morale was very good because, first of all, you had a lot of buddies. You had those you'd worked with before the war. You worked with them because you were forced to do so in the rice paddies. We had nicknames, of course, for all the Japanese guards. Air Raid, Minus Five, Mickey Mouse, and the like. We had faith. We knew that our country was going to come and get us, that our country in the long run was certainly going to defeat the Japanese, so morale was good. But, once we got on one of the hell ships, and there was only the one trip that was really, really bad, the one on the Oryoku Maru. There was no morale to speak of. It was pretty much every man for himself. When I escaped from that ship, I went around and removed the canteens from dead bodies. My only possessions then were a pair of under shorts, an Army belt, and about five empty canteens, that I put on those belts so that I'd have some flotation because I had no idea how far I was going to have to swim. But, what I noted was that unless you had a belief and a faith and a hope, you died. I had a West Point classmate who was First Captain our senior year. That's the number one cadet in the corps. He had a very dear professor there that we all liked very much, of Engineering. It so happened that when he went to the Philippines, this First Captain, he was assigned to that man's battalion, which was an Engineer battalion. That man died on one of these ships, from wounds he'd received, and Johnnie Pressnel, this First Captain who adored him, died a few days later, not from any apparent reason except that he gave up. You had to have a strong will and a strong belief in something other than your fellow men to survive.
You talked about escaping from the ship. That was the ship that was bombed?
Yes.
And you had to get --
Yes.
You really hadn't escaped from the Japanese, you had just, every man for himself.
No, no. They, eventually, gave permission for the prisoners aboard to abandon ship. We were about 3 to 400 yards from shore was all. They had patrol boats that forced us to go where they wanted us to.
Okay. What was your rank?
I was a major then.
You were a major. So, did you have some kind of leadership responsibilities delegated by the Japanese?
No. No. In the camps, the senior person was always a lieutenant colonel, after the colonels had been taken away. The main jobs, of course, were to organize the work details to satisfy the Japanese and to run the best with whatever food we were given, and in most of the camps that consisted of rice and sometimes vegetables and sometimes a little meat to cook up in two separate big pots called "kawas," and that's what we ate.
What was the relationship of the enlisted man and the lieutenant colonel? Was it a good relationship or --?
Yes. They paid no attention to rank. You know, the Geneva Conventions require that officers not work, but we hadn't signed them even though we agreed to abide by them. The Japanese said we didn't sign them, so we all worked. That was probably good for us. For the most part, the officers were in one barracks and the enlisted men in two or three others, although once we were on these trips, we were totally intermixed. There was no differentiation at all.
You talked about the good times in the first camp, with the recreation and everything.
Yes.
Once you moved from there and went to the camp with the rice paddies and on, was there any recreation or anything like that or was it all work and sleep?
It was pretty much work and sleep. We did have Sundays off, and they did not prohibit us from having church services, which we did have on Sunday. That was one day we got to rest. We didn't have any equipment to do exercises with, and for the most part, we were willing to rest our bodies because planting rice is never fun.
Did you have any direct contact with the Japanese?
Oh, sure. The guards that guarded us every day.
What were they like?
They just were doing their duty. They were doing their duty. For the most part, they were not hitting you with their rifles or anything like that unless you got out of line or did something wrong. I did something wrong once, and I got in big trouble with an officer. It was, in planting rice, the Filipinos, of course, don't do it this way but, because we weren't used to it, the rice paddies are fifty meters on a side, square for the most part. And we had to plant three of them a day. We did that by getting bundles of seedlings tossed to us from the side. We had a rope across the paddie that had knots on it, every ten inches, and that rope was supposed to be pulled back ten inches, and you'd back up as you planted the paddie. One day, they decided they had to make a big push to get all the rice in, and so they took everybody in camp, including the older people who were normally basket weavers. They made the baskets that we harvested the rice in, and put them out. They'd never done it before. On that day, I happened to be manning the rope, and it was very clear that we would be there 'til midnight with these neophyte planters, so I started lengthening the distance between the rows, 'til I got out to, you know, eighteen inches, two feet. Well, at noon, the Jap lieutenant came on the train, and he looked right down those rows, and, of course, the rope guy on the other end of the rope and I got what we called a strafing. We got knocked around but good, no food, required to move to what they called a Japanese rest position. That's on your knees, sitting back on your heels, and while in that position, he'd come up and knock us around every once in awhile. So, when you did something like that, you'd get punished, physically.
You were injured.
I was injured there. I was injured in one of the bombings, yeah. Minor. I would call it minor.
Okay. Did your family know that you were alive?
They did allow us to send, I think in those three years, three postcards home. They were standard postcards. On the back of them, they had a multiple choice series of questions, like "I am (a) well, (b) sick, (c) nearly dying." So, you know, everybody was optimistic. My wife received some of those. Some people received them. They were forever getting there, of course. Some people received them after their person was dead.
Did you get any mail from home?
I did. My wife wrote me every day. I think I got two bundles while I was in this prison camp, oh, about a year old, some including pictures of my baby. Yeah.
So then, you got home to San Francisco, and then to Denver, where you were reunited with your wife and child. What happened then?
Well, we stayed in Denver awhile. I met my old friends, then they started something called "Project J" in which they took forty or fifty prisoners and their families on an orientation tour of all the schools of all of the branches of the Army, sort of to bring them up to speed. So, we were about ten days at each: Benning for Infantry, Sill for Artillery, Fort Bliss for Anti-aircraft, the Armored School at Fort Knox, and then I was ordered to the staff and faculty of the Artillery school at Fort Sill, with the intention of taking the Advanced Officers Course, which is what I did. All of that followed my having turned myself in to be tested for schistosomiasis, which is a disease we all had. That's a liver fluke that one gets from planting rice or getting his feet wet in the mud, and getting eggs laid in his liver and so on. It's a snail that lays these eggs in the rice paddies. That was a very long and tedious cure, which I had at Walter Reed. When I finally got clean from that, then I was able to come out to Sill and take the Advanced Officers Course.
Was their a point where you made a decision to stay in the Army versus not stay in the Army?
Yeah, although it was never --. I never seriously considered not staying in. One of my father's friends here wanted me to go in business with him. Some idea about liquid sugar. But, I never seriously considered it.
How did the war change you?
Oh, I think it made me grow up, and I got over being a kid. [Phillips chuckles] I think that's what it did. And, it made you realize that there really is a power bigger than you are, although you might not think that when you're in you're in your twenties, your early twenties, anyway. Yeah, it made me realize that life's a serious undertaking and you have a lot of responsibilities.
Following the war, you moved up in rank, eventually became Brigadier General. What were some of your assignments in those years?
Well, as I say, I went to the Officers Advanced course at Fort Sill, and they kept me on the faculty, and I taught the Advanced Course Gunnery there for three years. Then, I went to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. That's a course to teach you to be a division staff officer, even a Corps staff officer. From there, I became a battalion commander of an Armored Artillery Battalion in the First Armored Division at Fort Hood, which was training to go to Germany at the time. From there, I actually went to Germany, and I was in the Headquarters of the United States Army in USAREUR [United States Army Europe] in Heidleburg, where I was in the Civil Affairs Military Government section. One of the interesting things there I went on a sealed [?] train to Berlin, this is before the Wall [Berlin Wall] was erected to visit the refuge camps, because there were over a million people who had escaped from the eastern part of Germany into Berlin, into the American sector of Berlin that we were supporting. Because, in Civil Affairs Military Government, our biggest problem that we never did solve really, was how do you take care of refugees if the Russians attack? We knew there'd be millions of them. After I was there a year and a half, I wanted to get back to troops, so I got myself transferred to the 2nd Armored Division Headquarters at Bad Kreuznach, Germany. The general had asked me to come to be his G-3.
Which is what?
Plans, Plans Officer for the 2nd Armored Division. 2nd Armored Division is interesting. It was trained by then Colonel Patton, and it turned out to be the first unit of any allied force into Berlin. The day I arrived there, for assignment, I also got informed, when I reported there, that I had been ordered home to go to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk. Now, this is a college run for lieutenant colonels mostly, some colonels, by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it consists, of course, of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and they learn staff duties that are at the higher levels. When I finished that course, which was about five months, I was assigned to the Pentagon, and there I had the, I was in Joint War Plans, and I had the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] desk. NATO had been formed in '47 [1947], and now this is what, 1954. So, that was a very interesting assignment. I first learned about the Joint Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I worked there for two years, very hard work, long hours, and I ended up being the Action Officer on one of the joint families of plans called the Joint Strategic Objective Plan, and that's the plan, or was at that time, on which the budgets of all the services would eventually be based. It's a plan that there was great dissention about, and it was set by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and was supposed to be the basis for the budget. Now, that was prior to the McNamara years. Those were the years when the national policy was retaliation, which was not effective very long because the Russians soon got the bomb, too. I went from there to the, well, I went to the Joint Staff, and I was, I ended up there as the Executive to the Director of the Joint Staff, who was a Air Force lieutenant general. Had some extremely interesting experiences there, especially during the time when we invaded Lebanon in 1958. A lot of people don't remember that. I went from there to the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington [Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.]. From there, I went to Korea, where I was the deputy commander of the 1st Corps Artillery. Lived in a camp called Santa Barbara, which is north of the 38th parallel.
But that was after the war was over.
That was after, oh, yes. After the war was over. This was '60, '61 [1960-1961].
Kind of manning the demilitarized zone.
Exactly. Exactly. In fact, we sent aircraft up twice a day from our little base there to patrol the DMZ [demilitarized zone] and observe what the communists were doing. I went from there to the faculty of the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks. It was while I was there in my third year that I was promoted to a brigadier general in 1964, on the 1st of June. I then went back to the Pentagon and was, I was put in a section called Assistant Chief of Staff for Force Development. That was a lieutenant general's job, and I was in the Plans part of that. I had under my aegis, the Army's operational budget, the Army's training budget, the development of plans and programs for the units that should be in the Army and in the Reserves, below division level. Everything below division level. The number, where they should be, and so on. Toward the end of that second year, the Secretary of the Army chose me to set up a new position that would report directly to him and to the Chief of Staff of the Army, called the Joint Plans and Analysis Office. He did so because the Undersecretary of the Army [veteran meant to say Defense], who'd been a Yale classmate of his, said that the Army's response to the defense, McNamara was there then, to the defense requirements for their planning, programming, and budgeting program were not quite up to snuff. They had one more chance to straighten it out. So, I was given that job. About that time, I decided that it was just too much. I was neglecting my family, and I decided to retire. So, even though I was promised promotions, I decided that was the best thing to do. I then went to work for a couple of years at the Army's federal contract research center, which was called RAC, Research Analysis Corporation. It's owned by the Army, it was then, owned by the Army. They did work that the staff either didn't have time to do or was incapable of doing. Had a lot of systems analysis and operations research people in there.
All civilians.
All civilians. There was a liaison Army colonel always there. A lot of retired Army officers, including four star generals, as advisors. Then, the Congress passed a law that required every service to have an Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. The man that got the first of those jobs was a person who'd been on McNamara's staff and with whom I'd worked very closely. He asked me to come back and help him organize that. So, I left Research Analysis Corporation. I went back to the Pentagon for a year, and then returned to Research Analysis Corporation. About that time, the Army decided to sell RAC. They sold them to a company that was a civilian company, so I knew I could no longer stay there because I would have to be trying to sell studies to the Army, and I had a conflict of interest. So, the same chap was the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower, and he asked me, I asked him could I come back, and he said, "You bet." So, I went back and became his principal deputy, which is a GS-18 job, and I then stayed for, 'til I retired in 1979, nearly a total of nearly ten years in that position. I saw the Army through the end of the draft, testified many times before Congress on a lot of different issues. Then, I moved back to Colorado.
Have you stayed in touch with any of your fellow prisoners from your World War II days?
Yeah, I have. I won't in the future because I don't know any of them, because they've pretty much all died out. I had a very close classmate, also artillery, who was stationed at, went over on the same ship as I did, was stationed at Fort Stotsenberg. We were in prison camp together most of the time. He survived the same ship trip that I did. He, we both took the Advanced Course together. When I was on the faculty at the War College, he was a student there. Matter of fact, he worked for me at RAC at one time. So, I've stayed in close contact with him all through the years, but he died last year. So, there's no one else.
Do you belong to any veterans' organizations?
No. I contribute to quite a few. VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars], American Legion, but I don't belong to any.
Have you attended any military reunions?
Of units?
Uh-huh.
No, I have not.
Why have you settled here in Douglas County?
Well, when I retired, I lived in the mountains up near Winter Park, where I had bought a condo [condominium] in the early '70s [1970s], and when I got, I actually retired in 1979 out of distress over the way the then Secretary of the Army was ignoring what I will call the "quality" of people coming into the Army. The draft was long gone. It had quit seven years earlier, actually. We were using inadvertently a qualification test that had been mis-normed [?] by the Air Force, so we were taking people into the Army who legally were prohibited from taking in. The so-called mental category "Fives." That's a person who scores from zero to nine on the basis of a hundred. That was because the test was mis-normed, and that was no one in the Army's fault. This Secretary of the Army was a man you could not use the word "quality" in his office if it applied to people. From the very beginning of the all-volunteer Army, we kept very careful track of success in completing the first enlistment because, if you don't do that, it's very expensive to the Army. The training's expensive, the clothing you've been issued is expensive. It just doesn't pay to enlist a man who's going to drop out, or any person, man or woman. So, we kept very, very careful records, based on age, educational achievement, sex, race. What we found out was the person with the highest rate of success was an eighteen-year-old white male with a high school diploma who scored in the 1-A bracket, ninety-one to a hundred. We found out that if that were a woman, instead of a man, eighteen year old, everything else being equal, she was going to leave the Army, ten percentage points higher, going to leave. We found out that ten percent of the women were pregnant at all times. That was consistent. Obviously, we found out that the worst person you could take was a black high school dropout who was twenty-six years old, because he'd tried a lot of things before, in mental category 4-C. So, we had all of these statistics and so we tried to get our recruiters to recruit in the upper half. High school graduates. He didn't care about any of that stuff. So, I thought, we doing --. So, I quit. Just out of the blue.
So, what are you doing now in retirement?
Well, when I first retired up in the mountains, I was skiing and fishing and hiking and playing Mah Jong. We had a wonderful social life, traveling a great deal. Here, I'm running elections. I've run two so far. I've run a campaign for raising money for the, what's called the Staff Appreciation Fund. You know, no tipping is allowed here. We have all kinds of hourly employees here. All of the security is hourly. They're the guys that answer the bell cord, if you pull it, you know. You can't tip them. None of the people in the medical side that draw blood, they're all hourly workers. The people in the exercise room are hourly workers. Of course, all of the people that serve in the cafeteria and prepare the food are hourly workers. The people that clean your house are hourly workers. The general service people who repair, so in November, they had this drive. We raised $75,000, and there were 187 of them, so they all got a nice year-end bonus. And, I'm also writing some of this up.
Writing your life story.
Yeah.
Good.
I have already written through the first eighteen years of my life, and sent it to my grandchildren and all. Now, I'm picking up when I went to West Point.
Well, Paul, thanks for sharing your story. It will be archived for future generations to help them better understand the experiences of those who participated in the Second World War.
Thank you, Joe.