Tour of the past
Roy Weaver recently returned to a “home” he last saw 62 years ago, one he thought he’d never want to see again.
It wasn’t home in the traditional sense, but the barracks in northern China in which the 88-year-old Coeur d’Alene resident lived as a prisoner of the Japanese during most of World War II.
The camp the enemy called “Hoten” was where Weaver ate, slept, worked and suffered for nearly three years until he and about 1,000 of his fellow prisoners were liberated at war’s end in August 1945.
Their prison was in Mukden, Manchuria, when Weaver and 1,500 fellow prisoners were herded off a train there in November 1942. Today, it’s part of China and called Shenyang,
In April of this year, a Chinese organization dedicated to preserving the history of Japan’s occupation during the second World War provided Weaver and eight other former Hoten POWs an all-expense paid trip to Shenyang. Forty-six other men and women – relatives of other prisoners – also made the trip at their own expense.
Weaver was a 23-year-old corporal, a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps, when he was captured in early May 1942 at Fort Hughes, an island garrison in Manila Bay.
He was imprisoned on that island briefly, shipped to a prison in Manila, then transported to the infamous Cabanatuan Prison, still in the Philippines. There he was held with some 10,000 Allied servicemen who, because of meager rations, suffered from multiple diseases including dysentery, beriberi, malaria, scurvy and pellagra.
A quarter of the men died during the first eight months.
Weaver volunteered with 2,000 other men for a work detail somewhere in the north where, they hoped, there would be more food.
During a 31-day voyage, their ship was attacked by an American submarine which fired three torpedoes that missed. Eleven men died and were buried at sea because of the paucity of rations.
They eventually docked at Pusan, Korea, where Weaver was among 1,200 prisoners who were issued Japanese uniforms, then marched aboard a train for the three-day trip to Mukden. The prisoners remaining on the ship were transported to Japan.
At Mukden, about 1,500 men, most of them Americans, lived in wooden barracks. For some, their stay was brief: 235 died of disease, malnutrition and the cold during that first winter when temperatures hovered at 35 to 40 degrees below zero.
“We were given blankets, but little coal or wood, and the food was very poor,” Weaver says. “Our breakfast was cornmeal, and lunch and dinner was a purple soup made with millet. We called it bird seed.
“One of the men I knew traded much of his food for cigarettes. Not a smart thing to do for long-term survival. He died.”
By February 1943, Weaver, who is 5 feet 7 inches tall, had dropped from his pre-war weight of 145 pounds to 118. The prisoners were told that, if they worked, they’d get better rations, so he was among the 300 to 400 who volunteered for duty in a tool and die works about three miles from camp.
Weaver roughed out machine parts and calipers and, as a factory worker, he received a soybean-based lunch and dinner. He started regaining weight and, when finally released, weighed 140 pounds.
He and his fellow POWs fought the war in their own way: “We did a lousy job of making tools, and when a concrete base for a huge lathe was being poured, we pitched what good tools we could find into the wet cement.”
He was punched and kicked by guards on several occasions but was beaten severely only once, by a sadistic captain the prisoners called “The Bull” who struck him repeatedly with his sheathed sword.
Weaver’s supervisors in the factory were Japanese civilians who, he says, treated him and his fellow prisoners fairly well, even to the extent of sharing whiskey with them during the Christmas seasons of 1943 and 1944.
The day after the Japanese surrendered, the Office of Strategic Services – predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency – parachuted six men into the camp. Four days later, Russian troops arrived and the prisoners were finally freed.
During the former POWs’ recent homecoming tour, their Chinese hosts “worked” their guests hard: “We were on the road at 8 a.m. and didn’t get back to our rooms until 10 at night,” Weaver says. “The schedule was done by someone who forgot that when we left Shenyang 62 years ago we were in our mid- to late-20s and we’re now in our late 80s. It became rather exhausting.”
Despite that, he thoroughly enjoyed the trip, he says.
“The Chinese put us up in five-star hotels, gave us little gifts, and treated us like heroes. And prior to the trip, they even sent a China National television crew to Coeur d’Alene to record my wartime experiences.”
A high point of the tour was finding his old barracks intact. In the years since the war, it had housed low-income Chinese, but now the former camp is being converted to a museum. The Chinese have even constructed a set of wooden bunks like the ones on which Weaver slept.
The site includes two walls with the names of the POWs who were held there.
“A personal plus was I was able to fill in some of the blanks for a couple of people on the trip, including one whose grandpa was with us in camp,” Weaver says.
“Although I didn’t know his grandpa, it was clear that for a time I had worked with or around him. The other, I personally knew his father, another Marine, and was able to contribute a bit to his dad’s life story as a POW. That was a plus in my trip and my life.”
Weaver retired from the Marine Corps as a gunnery sergeant in 1964 and, like most leathernecks, is extremely proud of his service. Remarkably, he doesn’t hold any bitterness about his imprisonment.
One day some years ago, he found a note on his car parked in the Coeur d’Alene Fred Meyer lot. With a POW license plate and a decal on the window identifying its owner as one of the “Battling Bastards of Bataan,” a part of Weaver’s history was obvious to at least one passer-by.
“The note was in a woman’s handwriting,” Weaver says. “It read, ‘Shame on you. A former Japanese POW driving a Toyota.’
“If I could have met that woman,” Weaver says, “I would have said three things to her: The first would have been, ‘The war ended 50 years ago. Get a life. I did.’
“The second would have been, ‘If I spent a lifetime wallowing in what I went through in that prison it would have hurt me, not my former enemies.’
“And finally, I would have told her that I like to drive a quality car.”