Things were steadily getting worse in the prison camp,
 
particularly among those prisoners who were too weak to go on work
 
details, and thus were unable to steal any food. The problem of
 
smuggling in food to these prisoners was also becoming harder, as
 
the Jap guards had begun to search most of us when we returned
 
from the prison farm.
 
     Conditions in the camp only spurred our determination to
 
make a break. Of the working prisoners, very few had footgear of
 
any kind. It is still a nightmarish memory to think of American
 
prisoners, their bodies weakened by malaria and beri beri, working
 
in rice paddies with mud and water up to their waists. Eight
 
hundred of the prisoners were in a separate compound as unfit 
 
for work. These were the prisoners partially or totally blind due to
 
diet deficiencies, those whose beri beri kept them from walking,
 
those with severe hernia, and others with various illnesses. Two
 
hundred others had already been removed to the hospital as
 
totally unable to care for themselves, and this number was in-
 
creasing daily. Almost no medicines were available for any of
 
these prisoners.
 
            At about this time--early in the second week in March--
 
an Army lieutenant colonel in charge of a sugar cane detail
 
attempted to smuggle some cut sugar cane to the American pris-
 
oners in the hospital. The lieutenant colonel was caught by a
 
guard, cuffed about, and taken to Jap headquarters. As punishment,
 
the American camp commander and his adjutant--both chosen as such
 
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