News-Info-Alerts

Re: Physical Effects Lifelong

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 08, 2002

"Physical effects lifelong after 4-year imprisonment

Carl Gidlund - Correspondent

Coeur d'Alene _ You might have caught a glimpse of Stanley Shipp and a handful of his buddies in Coeur d'Alene's Fourth of July parade this week. They paid a steep price for the privilege of participating.

A passenger in the Ex-Prisoner of War Association's truck, Shipp's ticket to ride cost him nearly four years in a Japanese POW camp.

Shipp was captured two days after World War II began. He was held in four prisons on their home islands, took care of hundreds of his fellow allied prisoners, and was almost an atomic bomb victim. He was finally released 32 days after the war ended.

A 20-year-old Navy pharmacist's mate when the Japanese invaded his base on Guam, Shipp's weight dropped from 165 to 101 pounds during his imprisonment.

Prolonged malnutrition and rifle butt blows to his kidneys have taken a permanent toll: His extremities are numb, and his urinary problems are so severe that the Department of Veterans Affairs classifies him as 100 percent disabled.

But despite his ill health and the cruelties he endured, the 81-year-old vet doesn't hold any animosity toward the Japanese people.

"For the most part, the civilians were no better off than we were," he explains. "I saw women pulling up grass for food, and the only time any civilians tried to harm us was in April 1942, the day after the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. Our guards prevented a small mob from beating and stoning us."

His medical skills were in demand to treat his fellow prisoners. Those included British, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, Mexican, Portuguese, Indian and Chinese troops and civilians as well as Americans. He and his fellow medics and a few captured doctors did what they could for the sick and wounded, but they had only a limited supply of Red Cross drugs.

Shipp estimates that about a quarter of those he cared for died. He kept a pencil-and-paper log of the victims' names and their death dates. Since that sort of a record was forbidden by their captors, he hid it in his barracks' rafters.

The prisoners were on starvation rations during most of their internment. They called their principal dish "air raid soup" because it was so thin, "like the all-clear signal after an air raid," he explains.

By March 1945, it had become obvious that an invasion was near. Japanese soldiers and civilians were digging tank traps and shaping bamboo spears with which they'd fend off invaders. The prisoners were warned that a cave behind their camp had been wired for explosives.

"They told us that if paratroopers landed, we'd be herded into it and blown up," Shipp says.

One summer morning a B-29 dropped pamphlets containing information regarding the bomber offensive against Japan. They named 13 cities that would be targets. The city of Yawata, five miles from Shipp's camp, was second on the list because of a huge steel mill there.

On the morning of Aug. 8, 1945, a B-29 circled Yawata several times, looking for a hole in the clouds. It couldn't find one, so it finally flew off to drop its atomic bomb on Nagasaki, some 50 miles south.

"The next day Emperor Hirohito informed the nation that the war was over," Shipp recalls. "When we felt positive that the day we'd waited for so long had at last arrived, many of the men broke down in tears."

The former prisoners remained in their camps, but were "bombed" with food, clothing and medicines from B-29s. Finally, on Sept. 19, they were evacuated from Japan through the devastated Nagasaki and began their long journey home.

Shipp says the only long-term effects of his imprisonment are physical, but for many months following his return to the States and discharge, he was "fidgety, unsettled. When I'd hear a whistle signaling noon, I'd think it was an air raid. And my mom told me I chewed holes in my pillow cases when I was asleep."

Retired now from a 20-year career as parts manager for an auto dealership in St. Maries and 10 years as a buyer for the Potlatch Corp., Shipp is enjoying these years in Coeur d'Alene.

"I don't dwell on the war," he says, "but the festivities sure are a reminder of how good we have it here in America." "