“If you were not in the mines, you would take and unload coal off the ships onto railroad cars. We would work every morning about 4:00 am and you did not know where you were going to be, whether in the mine or on the ship or where. Then the next day…

"We were stacked in the hull of the ship. We were just stood up in there with no bathroom facilities, no nothing. A little food once a day, if you were fortunate enough to get some food, if not, you waited until the next day. We were packed in…

“Then I was [on] a train there— a hundred men to a box car. The doors all closed and when were arrived 3 or 4 days later, twenty-five or 30 men in each box car had died. Upon arriving at the camp in 1942, we were told by the Japanese that we were…

“I arrived in San Fernando, a sugar cane factory, or where a factory was, and kept in a barbed wire encampment for 3 or 4 days.”

“Our rings and watches and any gold that we had was taken by [the Japanese]. We were lined in columns of four and started marching up the one little narrow paved trail toward San Fernando. We didn’t know where we were going, but every time we met a…

“We heard small arm fire over the hill and then a little bit later the tanks came across. This was the 29th of April and this was Patton and he came in and he was about the second tank. Fortunately, they came in and broke the gates down and put the…

“We were grounded flyers and we had our wings, but we came up with, somebody in the camp came up with a symbol for us which was our wings with a chain and a ball attached to it. So we used our dog tag chains and the cans of food we got from red…

“We left off there at Stalag III. This was about the 7th or the 8th of June. We went down the 30th of May. This is the 7th or 8th of June and we were standing there by the loading platform and this real mean looking German guard came out hands on…

“So everybody got out and then I got out. This was my first parachute jump. I went out through the navigator’s hatch below and I said ‘Lord, help me get through this.’ I knew I only had two things. One was to get killed or do it. There was no…