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