WORLD WAR II PRISONER OF WAR

POW-MIA Forum

Disabled American Veterans

... A powerful true story of what really happened to American Prisoners of War in the Japanese Death Camps in the Philippines during World War II !....

"It was August of 1944, and John could barely see the Japanese guards enter the guardhouse because his eyes were almost swollen shut from previous beatings. He was beginning to think that it was all over for him. He was sure that the guards had been ordered to beat him until he died. There's nothing more these bastards can do to me because I'm no longer afraid of death, he thought as the guards entered his cage.

The guards began their usual ritual. They yelled at him in Japanese and started to hit him with their fists and a metal rod, and when he slumped down, they kicked him with their boots. There was a point when John just couldn't feel the pain anymore. He knew the guards were hitting him because he could feel the impact of their blows, but he just couldn't feel the pain. He was thinking about his family and friends and how he probably wouldn't see them again. As he felt himself slipping away from the reality of a very cruel world, he managed to somehow muster the strength to show his captors one last act of defiance. It was just a faint smile, but it would show them that in spite of what they had done to him, they hadn't defeated him."

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"POW-83" is about a young man named JOHN MACKOWSKI, who grew up in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn during the Depression and who was drafted into the Army in March of 1941, nine months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. John and his fellow soldiers and sailors were hastily trained and given inferior, outdated and often malfunctioning equipment with which to defend themselves. They were shipped out to the Philippines and ordered to fight a much larger and better equipped enemy while the rest of the country geared up for war. It is the story of a foot soldier, a Private First Class (PFC) in the U.S. Army, who fought bravely on Bataan and Corregidor before he was ordered to surrender to a vicious and violent enemy. Over the next two and a half years, he barely survived his captivity in several of the worst Japanese Death Camps in the Philippines before he escaped. There were 750 American Prisoners of War aboard the Japanese 'hell ship' THE SHINYO MARU on September 7, 1944. By late afternoon they all would be tested one final time and only 83 would survive!

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