We Survived War's Crucible

OVER TWO YEARS UNDER HOUSE ARREST

Big Bang Fourth of July (Pages 25-26)As the Fourth of July was approaching, Paul decided he would have a special celebration. He had several packages of Chinese firecrackers. ... he devised a way to make a little noisy bomb.  ....

He made time fuses by soaking cotton string in a saturated solution of potassium nitrate and .  ...  tested ... to calculate how long a fuse he would need  ....

Long before the Fourth, Paul made two of these noisy bombs with fuses long enough to burn for the length of time it took Paul to walk, without hurrying, the one block from our house up to the corner of Taft Avenue, a very busy thoroughfare. .... 

The Fourth finally came. Paul took the two bombs with their time fuses and went up to Taft Avenue ....  there were no soldiers around or anybody watching too closely. So he lifted up the grate on the storm drain, let down one of the bombs, and brought the fuse up through the grate, tying it so it wouldn't drop clear down out of his reach. He put the grate back down, walked across Tennessee to the other grate, and did the same. Then he sat down on the curb and watched the traffic.

Timing the traffic, Paul discovered that the length of time he had on his fuse, was almost the same as it took inbound traffic to reach this corner, from the circle he could see way out on Taft Avenue. Paul waited patiently. Finally, he saw three truck loads of soldiers coming down Taft Avenue. As they rounded the rotunda coming in his direction, he lit the first fuse, walked across the street, lit the second fuse, and sauntered on home. He got inside our fence, hid behind a bush and watched.

Just as the first truck appeared at the intersection his first bomb went off. Boom. It reverberated. There was a screeching of brakes and the tail end of the first truck was just barely visible down the sidewalk. The second and third trucks came .... All the soldiers came piling out of their trucks with guns at the ready. About that time the second bomb went off. Boom! The soldiers whirled about to find out who was attacking them. "It was only little old me," he liked to say .... The soldiers couldn't find anybody, so eventually they got back in their trucks and proceeded to wherever they were going.

"That was a real fourth of July celebration!" Paul bragged.

Helping Filipino Guerillas (Pages 27-28)

During the house arrest period the people at the Cosmopolitan Church were working with the guerrillas and sending things to them. Somebody infiltrated their number, so the soldiers came suddenly and picked them up. .... Mary Boyd Stag, the pastor, was .... beheaded .... along with several others. ....

A Colonel in the guerrillas, whom we knew, came wanting an American flag. .... to display on a hill slope as a signal to guide our submarines. They would indicate by standing in one corner or another whether it was safe for the sub to come in. We had a flag in our chest, and debated quite a bit before deciding to give it to her. It had my name on it. So with some indelible ink I completely obliterated the name and gave it to her.

We wrapped the flag in some yellow cloth and made a very neat long package which she fastened on the inside of her thigh. She got through with it and she brought the flag back after the war. I wish I had saved it.

Bugs in the Mush (Page 42)

To make the corn and rice mush, the cooks needed corn that didn't have too many weevils in it. .... The ladies would sit at long tables under a dim light, going over the corn, trying to pick out the bugs and the weevils before the corn was mixed with the rice. .....

In spite of the good ladies work, our mush still had weevils in it. We would pick them out and lay them aside as we ate. But Paul got to thinking. "Shucks," he said one day, "The weevils are cooked and there is a tiny bit of protein there. Anyway, whenever I take a bite, there probably is a little worm hiding in there somewhere. I don't see it, so it never gets picked out. And I haven't had any problem with any of them. So the next one I see I'll go ahead and eat him." That is what Paul did, and it didn't taste any different. So he picked up the ones he had put aside that day, put them back in the mush, and stirred them in. He didn’t bother picking any more out after that. Viola never was able to follow his example.

RESCUE (Page 56)

Several nights before the raid, Filipino guerillas took Sgt. Fulton across Laguna de Bay, behind Japanese lines. [He hid with his radio under the floor boards for several hours while the guerillas, posing as fishermen, evaded Japanese patrol boats.] He provided radio communication between the guerrillas and the 11^th Airborne headquarters. Two nights before the raid, a Reconnaissance Platoon under Lt. George Skau, with twenty Filipino guerrillas, crossed the lake and waited. Early on February 23, just berfore the paratroopers were to jump, they marked the drop zone and prepared to knock out three machine gun pill boxes. At 7:00 a.m. 11^th Airborne paratroopers, under John M Ringler, made a low altitude jump. Teams of guerillas, American soldiers and camp escapees eliminated Japanese guards. Fifty-four amtracs of the 672^nd Amphibious Battalion arrived. They took 2,147 internees to safety in two trips across the lake. Meanwhile, to the north, troops under Colonel Robert H. Soule engaged the Japanese 8^th Tiger Division, serving as a diversionary force and protecting the operation’s flank.