News-Info-Alerts

Re: War Keeps Popping Up In My Dreams

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: August 11, 2003

"'War keeps popping up in my dreams...'

By Ron Simon News Journal

The Grassick File

Name: Paul Grassick

Service: World War II POW in Japan.

Every day, this nation loses thousands of its veterans from World War II and the Korean War, men and women who put aside their duties here to serve their country.

Each Monday, the News Journal will profile a veteran of either war in an effort to tell the stories of these average north central Ohioans whose extraordinary efforts preserved freedom for us all.
BELLVILLE -- For Paul Grassick, 83, the dying, the brutality and the starvation of a life in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps will never end.

"The war keeps popping up in my dreams. I can't get rid of it," Grassick said.

At times, when the memories crowd in, his arms and hands begin to shake.

Grassick and fellow Mansfield resident Albert Allen were members of a light tank unit in the Philippines at the start of World War II. They were the first to fight in 1941, the first to be taken prisoner in 1942 and among the very, very few that survived the experience.

First, they survived the early battles and the long siege of Bataan. Then, they survived the "Death March" of American prisoners from Bataan to a POW camp about 100 miles away.

Then they survived years of brutal imprisonment. Their only satisfaction being that the men who created and seemed to relish their long misery were tried, found guilty and executed for war crimes.

For Grassick, the memories are so bad he can't always keep them at bay, even in a comfortable old age.

Grassick, who lives in a home he built in 1958 on Deerfield Drive north of Bellville, is retired from the former Tappan Co.

Company employees once raised $30,000 by pouring loose change and bills into coffee cans to send Grassick and his late wife, LaVerne, back to the Philippines to take part in a 25th anniversary thank-you bash for U.S. servicemen who were captured at Bataan and Corregidor in 1942.

Grassick remembers visiting a U.S. cemetery at that time. He remembers the burials in that cemetery; done late at night. "It was the rainy season. The holes we'd dug were full of water. We just dropped the bodies in and covered them up. They all were buried with their dog tags in their mouths," he said.

Of the six young Mansfield men who traveled to the Philippines with the 192nd Tank Battalion of the Ohio National Guard, four, George Zimmerman, Bob Miller, John Robinette and Earl Charles died in Japanese prisons or at Bataan.

Grassick has happier memories. "I was raised in a house at 331 E. Fourth St. The house is still there. The Depression wasn't too bad for us. My father was a plumber. We had a good family in a good home."

He and his friend Albert Allen graduated from Mansfield Senior High in 1938. Grassick worked for several city dry cleaners, delivered newspapers and played trumpet for his brother, Bill's band. "Bill played a lot at the old Ringside and the Greystone," Grassick said. "After the war I played with him for four years and we traveled a lot in the South."

But in 1940, the first draft notices went out and six Mansfield men were on the mailing list. Training was at Fort Knox, Ky., and Grassick has a photo of himself and three of his Mansfield buddies in front of an ancient "Mae West" M-1 Tank. "It had two front turrets," Grassick said. The other three were Zimmerman, Robinette and Charles.

The Ohio unit the six men were assigned to was sent to the Philippines in 1941 and was settled into a tent city at Clark Airfield.

"We all knew something was coming," Grassick recalled. "When it began, a general showed up and told us to get in our tanks and head north." The tankers ran into the Japanese invaders in northern Luzon and Grassick said it was a daily battle as the Americans maneuvered into the Bataan peninsula. "That's where we were going to hold out. But it didn't work out."

Soon, the tanks were out of commission, food and ammunition ran low and an entire U.S. Army group was forced to surrender to the Japanese.

Then came the "Death March" from Bataan to prison camps in central Luzon. "Nine days without food," Grassick said. "Just a lot of dying. Some guys died standing up. One of my friends went crazy. We slept on the ground and drank out of ditches. I had a canteen and a Jap knocked it out of my hand. When I reached for it, he kneed me in the groin."

The brutality and the dying continued in the camps, along with the burials. To this day, Grassick said, he can't stand rice. Too much of it included rat droppings and dirt.

Eventually Grassick was shipped to Japan. Allen was shipped to Manchuria.

In Japan, Grassick worked as slave labor building a dam in winter which resulted in frozen feet. Later, he stoked furnaces in a carbide factory. There was little food and no medical treatment. The dying continued. "We worked 12-hour days, seven days a week. There were constant beatings. Grassick was down to 80 pounds and forced to keep up heavy labor.

When it was over, Grassick was more than happy to supply testimony and evidence used in war crimes trials.

Now living with his second wife, Audrey, who he married in 1988 long after his first wife died, Grassick spends much of his time walking at Charles Mill Dam.

He spends little of it at military reunions. "I'm a member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor but most of the reunions are held too far away. And all they want to do is fight the war over again."

It's a war Grassick dearly wishes he could put behind him. Just to sleep better.

rsimon@nncogannett.com
©2003 News Journal"