News-Info-Alerts

Re: A Secret POW War

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 21, 2003

"Former POW reveals secret weapon in Japan: sabotage

FW vet, who'll speak at WWII reunion, tells of subverting his captors

By BERNADETTE PRUITT / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

WICHITA FALLS – While the Battle of Iwo Jima raged 58 years ago, Karl King was fighting a secret war of his own.

His weapon was sabotage.

As a Japanese prisoner of war 760 miles away, he set fire to a warehouse and helped build Japanese ships that would leak.

"We continued to fight from behind barbed wire," he said.

Mr. King, 78, a retired Fort Worth broadcast journalist and author, will be the key speaker Saturday at the close of the 11th annual reunion of the Iwo Jima Veterans and Family Group. The three-day event commemorates one of World War II's fiercest battles, which began Feb. 19, 1945.

Mr. King was 14 when a recruiter added four years to his age and allowed him to join the Marine Corps. With the approval of his mother, who had difficulty supporting him at the end of the Depression, he went off to boot camp, where he turned 15.

His initiation into combat came in 1942, fighting the Japanese on the Philippine islands of Bataan and Corregidor. For throwing a grenade into a Japanese gun pit, Mr. King, of Co. L, the 3rd Battalion of the Marines' 4th Regiment, later received the first of two Bronze Stars.

On May 5, 1942, after seizing Bataan, the Japanese made an amphibious landing on Corregidor, overpowering American forces.

"It was like sitting on the bull's eye during rapid fire practice," Mr. King recalled.

The following day, when Corregidor fell, he was one of 11,000 people taken prisoner. He was 17.

He became a slave laborer at the Yokohama shipyards outside Tokyo. Assigned to the electrical shop, he joined a group of POW saboteurs already at work.

"We built 23 ships in more than two years," he recalled. "Of that number, 18 limped back for repairs, three never came back and one sank at the dock."

Mr. King said he pushed several spools of cable, essential for a ship's electrical and communication systems, into the bay.

"The warehousemen would know to load extra spools in a secluded place for dumping into the water," he said.

The teenage captive also set a nearby warehouse on fire, destroying Japanese military office supplies.

"I let a cigarette drop into the straw on the floor," he said.

Other POWs did their part, including making defective pipes in the pipe-bending shop, contaminating oil used in winches and draining fuel tanks. Rivets were undercut, so they would eventually leak, and welders made bad welds.

"We called these things 'targets of opportunity,' " he said. "We felt we had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted, and we did it right under the noses of the Japanese."

Their captors' lack of suspicion was the result of cultural differences and belief in an ancient honor code, he said.

"To the Japanese, it was an honor to die in battle, but a disgrace to be taken prisoner of war. They saw us as so disgraced that we were grateful to them for just allowing us to live."

They couldn't imagine prisoners jeopardizing their lives, he said.

The POWs subsisted on boiled cattle feed, barley, soybeans and a soup made from sweet potato vines. Occasionally there was a fish head or a small loaf of bread to be split among four people.

"The acts of sabotage kept us going," Mr. King said. "It was necessary to live to defeat the Japanese."

When the steel supply ran out for shipbuilding, he and other POWs loaded freight cars in Tokyo. There, the sabotage continued. They stole rice and shared it with Japanese civilians. Supply truck drivers feigned mechanical problems, forcing the delay of deliveries. Electric meters were disabled by running high voltage through them.

Mr. King, who received two Purple Hearts and earned a second Bronze Star for abuses suffered as a POW, said he's not sure what would have happened if the saboteurs had been caught. But the beating death of one prisoner for cutting a scarce piece of cable too short showed one possibility.

The prisoners had no knowledge of Marines capturing the Pacific island of Iwo Jima in a pivotal 36-day battle leading to the end of the war. But six months later, in August, 1945, they learned of the first atom bomb when a guard showed up to march them to work. He read from a newspaper: "One plane, one bomb. Hiroshima is finished."

Two days later, the guard told the prisoners that their work was finished.

"To celebrate, we drank the rest of some pineapple alcohol that we'd hidden," Mr. King said.

The liberated corporal, who had joined the Marines as a 6-foot-1 teenager weighing 200 pounds, was on his way home to Texas. He weighed 118 pounds and had spent 1,215 days as a prisoner of war. He was 20 years old.

In 1999, at his daughter's urging, he self-published Alamo of the Pacific, a book about war and sabotage in the Philippines.

"It gave me a sense of pride as a newsman," said Mr. King, who worked for radio and television stations in Dallas and Fort Worth.

It was also a catharsis, he acknowledged. He has gone from being a young veteran with occasional nightmares to an older one who has found peace.

"I'm so grateful to the Lord for my life as it is today," he said.

Bernadette Pruitt is a free-lance writer based in Wichita Falls.

The Dallas Morning News"