Tampa, Florida					Thursday, September 09, 2010

AFWESPAC POW #1 Base X Manila
Monday, May 17, 2004
TAMPA—The unsettling reports involving imprisoned detainees in Iraq and their conditions of imprisonment by our American units so assigned beg for a counter-punch. I’ve got one, and so does former big league catcher and television host Joe Garagiola, and all of the others of our Company C, 785th Separate Tank Battalion who still live all these years and conflicts later. I’ve told this story before, but for a different reason, no I tell it again and with a different approach. It is certainly is pertinent now. One who could tell it well would have been Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Early Wynn, who died a few years ago in Nakomis, FL. He was with us from the start of this true tale. Joe Garagiola and I have talked about through these 50-plus years, as we did with Wynn, with Phil Anderson, a Palm Beach lawyer whose son made a place in military history for himself 20 years ago when he shot down a Liberian fighter or two. Both Joe and Anderson were also involved from the start to the finish. Time works on memory, of course. Accuracy gets a break here. We were no heroes. We were simply American soldiers first who knew about tank fighting but not about civil affairs or building a barbed wire camp on a city dump outside Manila in the Philippines, but we grew that stark but clean enclosure to about 100 100 squad tents housing the 2,000 detainees, each with a bunk, foot locker, and shelf, in time where they could ferment their own rice wine. There were detained there both soldiers and civilians, but never any women. All were taken into our camp as prisoners and for their own safety and because they were the enemy. The War Crimes Japanese had committed were plenty and well known. Given a chance, the Filipinos would kill Japanese on sight. The A- Bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so Japanese soldiers were surrendering in masses to any Americans they saw in the Philippines, but did not want to surrender to the Filipinos, as the Iraqis did during the Gulf War. The Japanese had been brutal, indeed barbaric against Americans and Filipinos, the British, all who stood against them. They knew and we knew the Japanese feared the Filipinos now that the war was over. General Plank was tough and top gun for POWS in the Armed Forces Western Pacific. He knew our camp would grow to about 2,000 in a matter of months that day he told us we were no longer Tankers but Civil Affairs, POW specialists. But, let’s back up a bit. I was 21, was a graduate of Field Artillery basic training alongside Tampa friends who were attending the University of Florida when we were summoned to Fort Bragg for the basic field artillery program. Others in my Florida class, including the late Red Pittman, who would in time become the publisher of the Tampa Tribune and I would become the Sports Editor. Another in the group was John Germany, who would become a senior partner in the Holland Knight Law Firm, co-platoon leader in Company C of the 785th Tanks with me, Phil Anderson, who also became a lawyer after World War II. Captain Howdowaine gathered us around a field in the Manila Dump. We had been sent to Armored Officer Candidate School in Fort Knox together, trained, and taken the fully equipped 785th to Manila to finish saving the world. However, when our battalion arrived in the Philippines, the Japanese surrendered and so there we were that spring of 1945 afternoon in that dump beside the Port of Manila hearing our assignment had changed. General Plant was ordering us to build a prison and that we would get our first hundred or so prisoners any time. Get ready. There was a railhead and a separate building on the prison property and several others nearby close for company use. He said the property would all be prison. He said we’d get prisoners from the battle fields, most wounded, and would in time care for 2,000. We should care separately, in a nearby area, for those summoned for war crimes trials. They would include top Japanese officers and civilian leaders, who once wrote a plea in blood on a Japanese flag to me seeking leniency. That was not in my hands. I kept the flag for a souvenir, later lost it. Capt. Hodowaine, big Michigander, would guide the company still, from a company area across a dirt road from the prison. Again, we were portside just outside the urban, horribly bombed Manila. I remember vividly, how it began at that assembly all these years ago. Captain Howdowaine said, “Little Mack (me), you have a college education, or some of it, you will be the prison officer. You will run it.’’ He told Lt. Andy Anderson he would be the maintenance officer. Told him to find the vehicles we need and keep them rolling. Lt. Coughlin was told to run the company for the captain. Lt. Phil Anderson was told to supply us all, food, clothing, the works and he would work with me, to trade the prisoners our needs, that is, the prisoners as a work force. Remember, Manila was the port of supply for a million or so American troops readying to invade Japan. Everything was arriving there daily on transports, as had my battalion after a 39-day troop ship voyage from San Francisco by way of Hawaii, Ulithi and Guam. The captain told Lt. Anderson, “you get us food and clothes and what we need to operate a prison camp. I	ain\'t never been in one.’’ All snapped to, saluted and turned to General Plank. With us at attention and with our sidearms (we never saw our Sherman tanks again. Could have used a couple, engines anyway. Said Plant: Ok. McEwen, for whatever reason makes you the prison officer. These guys are in your charge, the prisoners and civilians. Work them 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keep records in cases they get some money later. They are your barter, going nowhere. Use head son. Labor is at a premium here. Barter that labor for your food for them—class x rations. Same for Class Clothing, vehicles. You will have no trouble. The people leasing the POWs will pick them up here, return then, after feeding lunch. As for treatment, he said to be humane. Which I would have been and was. He mentioned the Geneva Convention as the guidelines for punishing limits. He said bread and water or two eels was the top of the punishment line, Then Gen, Plank was gone in his jeep, with driver. Next time I saw him was when he returned nine months later to close the prison, pretty neat by then, neat and clean . Since we were not going to invade the Japanese mainland and since we’d finally taken Iwo Jima and Okinawa, our prisoners would be shipped by train to a newer, bigger, safer facility on the south side out by old Fort McKinley. There’s a big, big American National Cemetery. It is a sacred place. It is beautiful. Well, back at POW Camp NO. l, AFWESPAC, the baseball players, like Garagiola, who went on to heroics in the 1946 World Series, then hosted the Today Show. He often mentioned me and saluted and gave his army serial number, which was 39638788. He did well. He was a good soldier but became a far better catcher and ball player. He won promotion to corporal, Garagiola did, but chose not to become a sergeant when it meant staying overseas longer. And he never beat anybody or forced them to do shameful things. Nobody did. Nobody tried. Nobody wanted to, thus the surprise at the prison horrors in Iraq being exposed. Not one prisoner ever tried to escape. The Filipinos would have killed them. Why not? After all those years and atrocities imposed by these people, on the helpless, why not? Angry Filipinos would ride by at night and fire automatic guns into the tents. Sure we chased them. No we didn’t get them. Sure, some Japanese were killed. Many came in half dead, from the jungle, with wounds, or jungle rot. We found and got Japanese, a MASH type. They had little medicine. We got it for them. The dispensary was beside my dispatch office. The Japanese medical people did what they could. For whatever reason, or on whose recommendation I made the important move, I do not remember. But, my best move was to choose the biggest, strongest non-commissioned officer I could find and made him the camp commander. He chose his staff. He ran the place, with my availability. His desk was next to mine in a little dispatch shack were we did out labor business, including dispatching. If a POW broke, misbehaved by his standard or mine, Sergeant Steele, as we named him, imposed the appropriate pentenance. Once he knocked a prisoner over my desk, but that was the only time. He did his sentenancing elsewhere. A typical punishment was for the guilty to stand in the center of the camp—the assembly area—with a sign around his neck declaring what he had done wrong. Again, no one tried to escape. No one was beaten, mistreated or mortified. Yes, I had two interpreters around all the time, the best a former Manila businessman we named Tim. Garagiola and I both recall when the very first prisoners arrived, at night, they were shoved around, a bit, but that was that and that was enough. None of that. And after one day, our guns were pointed outward from the camp, not inward. The POWs had it pretty good, food and drink, clean toilets that smelled good because we found a cache of perfume essence once near a dam called Wa Wa. The food was prepared by Japanese cooks but with the supervision of our own mess sergeant, Joe Mandola of Houston. Yes, they worked their 12 hours a day, and kept the prison spotless and I could not stop them from bowing when I, the young CO, inspected. Yes, they marched. Yes, they played little baseball. Yes, they had the roll calls. Yes, they were pelted by rocks thrown by Filipinos as they were trucked to work. Yes, guards were hit by rocks, too. Then came the order to shut it down. It was done. Garagiola left with Wynn to star for the Manila Dodgers then the Cardinals in America, Wynn to a Hall of Fame career with Cleveland. We stayed friends. Both made the Hall. I made the Wauchula Hall of Fame. But, before returning home, I left the work with Base X POW Camp No. 1 for duty with the Armed Forces Press Network in Rizal Stadium in Manila, then home to Fort Myers, FL, and to a life work in sports writing. No, again, none of us did anything wrong for the year we ran that prison camp. We did the work assigned and well. Oh, I stayed in the reserves and Florida National Guard and retired a lieutenant colonel, Armor. Sgt. Steele would be proud. But, not so proud of those soldiers now in the bad news in Iraq. Understood being tough, tough, tough, but not cruel. Might have done better to let the Iraqis handle their own problems such as that. ##
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