| OCR Text |
Show Harold W. Poole pril3, 2001 miles back at night--a ten hour day every day of the week. Except one day a month we got a day off. On this day--they had issued us some clothes and a blanket by the way in Japan, and they gave us a little clothes. We didn't get anything in the Philippines, but here they did. And a little better quality food. There wasn't enough of it, but it was a little better quality. You know what I mean? And they were trying, of course, to keep us in shape for us to work. That was their object, you know, to keep us in pretty good shape. And they were watching us close to make sure we didn't have any diseases, or something that would spread to them. But on our day off, we gathered up our blanket, and our clothes, and walked five miles to a fresh water, a cold water river, and washed the clothes in the river without soap. We hung them on bushes to dry. And then we waited until they dried. And then we gathered them up and walked the five miles back to camp. That was our day off once a month. And, anyway, it was pretty rough working there because the food wasn't great, and there wasn't near enough of it. It was mostly just rice again, you know. Once in awhile we'd get a little fish. Usually, it was fish heads, or fish that had gotten a little too ripe for them to eat, and they'd give it to us. And we were glad to get it because it was protein, you know, and good food. I was there for twenty months in this steel mill. And in the last few months of the war I was sent over--they broke it up. The B-29's were coming over real solid then, you know, and bombing everything around. And, so, I think they were cutting down the operations of the steel mill. They were probably running out of supplies, and how to get them, and everything else because of the bombing and so on. And so they moved us way over on the west side of Honshu, 33 |
