our captors--up to the end of 1945 the Japanese military prisoner-of-war authorities had announced loss than a third of the Americans then dead. More have died since, and it is our considered belief that not more than ten per cent of the American military prisoners in the Philippines will survive another year of the conditions which existed at the time of our escape. During our eleven months of captivity we were to see American officers and enlisted men driven to such as the cleaning of Japanese latrines and sewage systems-- each of us was forced to do both. We were to see American prisoners slapped and beaten without provocation as a commonplace occurrence, and most of us were tho helpless porsonal recipients of such treatment. We were to see Americans so crazed by thirst that they were forced to drink from muddy and polluted carabao wallows, although separated from the clean water of a running stream only by the menace of japanese bayonets. We were to see Americans by the hundreds suffering in various declining stages of scurvy, malaria, beri beri and other afflictions, because the Japanese would not give us our medications, which they had confiscated; neither would the Japanese permit us to use the fruits and vegetables which grew in profusion around our prison stockades. We were to see Americans slowly going blind from vitamin deficiency; and not one of us escaped without having suffered from one or more of the diseases and deficiencies which at one time |