News-Info-Alerts

Re: A Brave Soldier's Tale

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: November 08, 2002

"Tucson, Arizona  Thursday, 7 November 2002

A brave soldier's tale of survival - Paul Sandoval was 17 when he joined the Army.

by Bonnie Henry

Heroism doesn't just come on the battlefield. Sometimes it comes through sheer survival.

For three years, Paul Sandoval was held prisoner by the Japanese during World War II.

He survived Bataan. He survived a succession of prisons where beatings and beheadings were the norm.

And he survived the hell ship that took him to a Japanese slave labor camp.

"You never give up," says Sandoval, 80, who lives quietly in Nogales with Lupita, his wife of 56 years.

The American flag flies in his front yard. Two Bronze Stars hang on his living room wall. Yet his words are quiet, reflective, as he recalls the horrors of war - and what one man can do to another.

He was just 17 when he joined the Army in Flagstaff, summer of 1940.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he was in Manila, Philippines, assigned to the motor pool at Fort McKinley.

By Christmas Eve, Sandoval and the other troops were evacuating to the Bataan Peninsula. There, he drove trucks and ambulances as part of a medical detachment.

Two days before Bataan fell, April 9, 1942, the Americans bayoneted their gas tanks to run them dry and blew up an ammunitions dump.

One of the first Japanese Sandoval saw was an officer on horseback, brandishing a saber. "It had blood all over it." And then the officer gave orders to dispense tins of sardines to the Americans. "We were starving," says Sandoval. "We had been eating monkeys."

After the fall of Corregidor on May 6, Sandoval wound up at a prison in Cabanatuan City, in central Luzon, one of 6,000 American prisoners of war.

"Guys were dying like flies," says Sandoval, who endured malaria, dengue fever and dysentery.

The worst assignment was the burial detail, where prisoners used ripped-out window shutters to carry the dead to their shallow graves. "They put you in a group of 10. If one escaped, they shot the other nine."

In November '42, he and 1,500 other men were shoveled into three holds of a hell ship, bound for slave labor in Japan.

A dozen ships made up the convoy. "We lost four or five going over, torpedoed by the Americans or the British."

Their latrine was two slop buckets, soon overflowing. Their food was buckets of rice and whatever was swept from the decks into the hold.

After docking in the city of Moji, the crew, says Sandoval, left on liberty.

He and a shipmate, James Laird, broke into the ship's storeroom, ripping open sacks of sugar and tossing cans of corned beef to the starving men.

Punishment was swift: a succession of beatings, a Japanese court-martial, and a sentence of death by firing squad.

Both men were sent to a Japanese military prison. Separated by one cell, they talked through a trough toilet running between the cells.

Sandoval was beaten just about every day, and his weight plummeted to 85 pounds.

And then the Japanese Red Cross intervened. After a brief hospital stay, the two men were sent to separate labor camps.

Sandoval's was at Omari, right on Tokyo Bay. From January 1943 until war's end, he unloaded ships on the docks.

Even when American B-29s were bombing Tokyo every night, he had no idea the end was near. "On my birthday, Aug. 13, somebody hollered to me, 'The war is over.' "

Free at last, he returned to Arizona and to Lupita, his high school
sweetheart.

"I had no idea if he was alive or dead," she says.

Of course he was alive. He's a survivor, isn't he?

* Contact Bonnie Henry at 434-4074, bhenry@azstarnet.com or 3295 W. Ina Road, Suite 125, Tucson, AZ 85741.

© Arizona Daily Star"