but another escape attempt, in September of 1942, had a far different
 
outcome.
 
     This unfortunate attempt was made by two lieutenant 
 
colonels and a lieutenant in the Civil Engineer Corps, Navy. 
 
I shall not give the names of these men, because I believe their
 
families should be spared the details.
 
    On a very dark night, the two lieutenant colonels and the
 
Naval lieutenant were carrying out a plan to escape by attempting
 
to crawl along a ditch and thereby get through the wire around the
 
camp. Each was carrying a home-made club. They had almost reached
 
their objective when their progress was accidentally halted; an
 
Army enlisted man, said to have been a former Notre Dame football
 
star, stumbled into the three men in the dark.
 
     Whatever his reasons, one of the lieutenant colonels,
 
sprang from the ditch and laid about the enlisted man with his
 
club. Other Americans ran out of their barracks to stop this
 
fray, with the result that it became general and quite noisy.
 
After the actual fighting stopped, the first lieutenant colonel to
 
spring out of the ditch was quite loud in his recriminations,
 
taking the attitude that there had been a deliberate attempt inside
 
the camp to prevent his escape. The enlisted man denied this, and
 
since he was not a member of the officer's "shooting squad", and
 
so would not have suffered from the escape, he presumably was
 
sincere in his denial.
 
         At any rate, the lieutenant colonel used the word "escape"
 
so often that it got to the ears of the Japanese. The three Americans
 
 
                                              - 54 -