1945
Liberation
Winston Shillito
I was in Nagano (at liberation). The first B-29 we ever saw was in the jet stream. It was a surveillance plane. Not too long after that, in May of 1944, 45, they came in with the fire bombers. They brought in about 10,000 bombers and just literally burned Yokohama and Tokyo to the ground. This camp that I was in was a brickyard.

When they had the big raid it burned Tokyo and Yokohama to the ground. We didn't have water or electricity. We didn't have anything. We were having trouble getting food. After a few days, they organized us and moved us. We were marched about five miles from the railroad station. They told us before we left, "Now the Japanese troops will protect you from the civilians. March looking straight ahead. No smiles, don't look anywhere." They marched us out of that camp. It was unbelievable what we saw. We could look across that town and they was rubble about this high as far as you could see. No buildings standing. Everything had just been burned. They took us to the station, put us on the train and took us to a camp at Nangano. We there for almost two weeks and finally just commandeered a couple of trains and just left. We thought our troops would come get us. It turns out that McArthur had made a agreement with the Japs that they'd been a line of demarcation between Yokohama and Tokyo and our troops would not go north of [that] for a certain period of time. So we finally just got ourselves out of there.

Lorenzo Banegas
[They] flew a B-29 over the camp and [out] the bomb bay door [they] flew the American flag like this [along the belly of the plane]. And oh my, we started hugging and crying and shouting, you know. And I myself felt that we were in hell; when we saw the American flag, to me that was heaven.

David Johns
While we were going through Tokyo, the Americans were bombing Tokyo. Of course, we said Hurray! That's good.

I was up at Osaka and American planes had been bombing pretty regular. B-29's. And this one day they come over and instead of dropping bombs they were circling us. Well, one plane - the rest of them went on. We thought, "Boy he's looking to drop it right down the chimney." Pretty soon we see this thing come, kicked out of the airplane, and it was a weighted message pack. It said "Clear the area. We'll drop you food and medicine, and the war's over." They dropped us drums of food. We stayed there 12 days. They said "Don't leave until we notify you where to go." So we stayed there. We didn't care. We weren't working and we was getting all we'd want to eat by then.

We got up [one] morning and camp was vacated. The Japanese left because they knew if we ever got a hold of them...but we never got a chance. They left during the night.

They dropped the message to us to report down to this railroad station in town. "There'll be a train at a certain time and it will take you where you're supposed to go."

We got off the train and they put us on a destroyer. There was only maybe 120 of us [out of] 200 that went up there. The rest of them died.

We got on this destroyer and went to Yokohama. [They] took us off the destroyer and put us on the hospital ship. They lined us up and had us go through this ward. There were doctors in there and the ones that were well like myself - I was skinny and hungry but I was still going - we got put off the hospital ship. Those that were real sick they kept on. We were loaded on a cargo plane and they flew us down to Okinawa. We ended up staying 4, 5 days until the typhoon blew through. We got put back on a plane and went on into Manila. They kept us there for 2 weeks feeding us, doing nothing. I think what they were trying to do was get a little weight back on us. I weighed 92 pounds when I got out. By the time I got home I weighted 150.

[In Manila] I sent a telegram to my mother and my father telling them I didn't know when I'd be home but I'm on my way. I got home about a month later and they still hadn't received the telegram! About 2 days after I got home, well here it come!

[I] was ecstatic beyond belief. They helped us get drunk. I did that for about 2 weeks then I realized it was kind of stupid. My mother got a thing from the Department of the Army saying that sometime in 1943 I had died in prison camp. My mother, she's a firm believer. She said I don't believe it, he's coming home. And sure enough, I did.

Ruben Flores
We'd see the star on the planes and knew it was American planes. We all went into the middle of the compound. They threw down a bag of sand with a note in it, asking how many POWs were there. We put a great big P-O-W right in the middle of the compound with lime. The note said, "Put one (mark) for each 100 in the middle of the compound."

There were 700 of us there. To be sure we'd get enough, we put eight (marks) out there. Then he came back and threw another bag of sand with a note that said, "We'll be back with the torpedo planes. We'll be back in three hours with food and medicine."
They were back in an hour and half. They bombarded us with two drums, oil drums. They dropped khaki clothes, medications, and I'd never seen so much quinine and food, canned food. One of the drums fell on one of the buildings. There was one man inside that couldn't make it out and he was crushed. It was our only fatality we had during that time. Boy, we were eating, putting on new clothes.

From there we were all trying to get out of the camps. Our superior officer said, "Don't go out, the Japanese are pretty mad. It might get you killed."

So some of them did go out, and they came back and the next day others went out.

Manuel Armijo
One of the last things I was doing as a blacksmith - I was helping the old [Japanese] man sharpening machetes, as we would call them, to give to all the civilians. There were thousands of them. I guess they were going to use civilians to help kill Americans if they invaded.

[One day] they stopped sending all the shifts. They didn't send any that morning, August 15th. They brought in 50 dogs for the cooks to feed us. I hadn't eaten dog before but it was sure good.

Next thing we knew, here comes the big planes dropping what we thought was coffee cans. "Oh, look at these coffee cans." But when they came down they began getting bigger and they were 50 gallon drums welded together. They were filled with clothing, food.

Jack Aldrich
We get up to the smelter and we stand there and we stand there and finally we turn around and go back to the barracks. We're put out in the compound and they bring out a little platform and they put that Japanese commander on that platform and he has his interpreter. The Japanese commander spoke better English than the interpreter but that was not the way you do it. He spoke in Japanese and the interpreter said "The war is over. I cannot tell you who won." We knew who won. He said, "I hope you remain in camp and maintain your career as soldiers and not run around the countryside raping the women and killing the children."

And he got down and left and a great roar went up and guys were yelling and screaming. We had tags with our names in Japanese and we ripped those off. Names on the hats - we ripped that off. And threw that away. Went into the barracks singing God Bless America. Never realizing what was going to happen to us, we just knew the thing was over. At long last.

Ward Redshaw
One afternoon, one o'clock the sky was absolutely blue. You could see for miles. We had air raid shelters in our camp in which the dirt was dug down about three or four feet deep. We'd have to crawl in there for air raids. One of the things about prison camp is no matter where or when you'd move you'd have to count off. We had come out of the air raid shelters and were lined up, just finishing counting off and heard this tremendous roar.

We all looked toward Nagaski and saw this mushroom with all the colors of the rainbow. As we watched it, the mushroom cloud formed and these colors merged together into the most beautiful magenta.

Later, the Japanese told us it was an actual radio bomb and we thought those radios have really gotten to be wonderful things.