Former POW recounts 40 months of terror
By Carl Holloway special to The Star
"On Dec. 8, 1941, at three o'clock in the morning, a tall and lanky, twenty-three-year-old Marine corporal named Carl Holloway from Mississippi was jolted awake by a bugle sounding 'Call to Arms.'"
That's how author Hewitt Clarke begins a section in his book, "War Stories from Mississippi" about a defining period of my life in World War II. Just a few months later, fighting as a U.S. Marine on the island of Corregidor, I would be taken prisoner by the Japanese and spend the next 40 months in prison camps.
It was a struggle for survival that, as I wrote in my own book, "Happy, the POW," still brings me haunted memories and troubled sleep. It also helps me more fully appreciate and enjoy the everyday fruits of freedom.
In the early months of World War II, vastly superior Japanese forces were clobbering American ships and bases in the Pacific. Thousands of young Americans were to suffer their own holocaust or, better stated, the unholy cost of America's unpreparedness.
On Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines, American forces were subjected to months of continuous artillery bombardments and hundreds of bombing raids. After months of gallantly resisting the relentless Japanese assaults, the American forces were finally compelled to surrender.
When Corregidor fell in May 1942, thousands of other American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Japanese.
As Hewitt accurately recounts in War Stories from Mississippi, "we were forced to gather dead Japanese soldiers for burial or cremation. We were not allowed to bury dead Americans, which caused serious unsanitary conditions and resulted in hundreds of prisoners coming down with life-threatening diseases."
In the death camps and on board the "Hellships," many prisoners died under the most atrocious conditions - executions, beatings, starvation, disease, pestilence, mental and physical anguish. We lived under the constant threat of death, and as Hewitt writes, at one of the camps it was common for 50 or more prisoners to die every day.
Rescue came in August 1945 when we were given permission to paint "POW" on the roofs of the prison camp's buildings and American planes dropped food and medical supplies to us.
In all, according to statistics Hewitt recites from the U.S. military, the Japanese held 32,000 U.S. prisoners of war with a death rate of 37 percent. I guess we were lucky - Hewitt found that an estimated three million German POWs held by the Russians had a death rate of 95 percent.
I and the other fortunate survivors were left with scars that would never heal. I believe I was able to survive this terrible ordeal due in large part to an unsuppressible happy and positive spirit ‹ a spirit that earned me the nickname, "Happy."
Carl Holloway is a native of Pearl River County who, now retired from real estate and sales and management positions, makes his home in Meridian. He is the author of "Happy, the POW: A Short Story About a Long Ordeal." Holloway served for more than 13 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, including all of World War II and the Korean War, and 40 months in Japanese prison camps.