O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

—Isaac Watts, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”

Meanwhile, back on the island of Mindanao the 650 POWs selected from Dapecol, including Brown and sixteen other Latter-day Saints, had been taken to a new prison near an airfield at the village of Lasang. They had been told the Lasang camp would be an improvement with more food. It was not. The prison was small and tightly ringed by barbed wire, confining the prisoners to a much smaller area than at Dapecol. In addition, this was not an agricultural camp. Unlike at Dapecol, there would be no opportunities to surreptitiously supplement their inadequate diet with stolen food.

Instead of doing agricultural labor, the prisoners were put to work building an airfield.[1] It was hard, brutal work; the prisoners had to put crushed coral on the airstrip, which cut their bare feet to ribbons.[2]

Furious that they were forced to work for the clearly military purposes of the enemy—something that was prohibited by the Geneva convention—the prisoners engaged in a delicate balance of working at the slowest pace possible without attracting retribution by the guards. At times, they even deliberately sabotaged the work.[3] The consequence of failing to convince the guards that they were trying to complete the work or of getting caught at sabotage was, if not death, a round of brutal torture.

After a while, their days at Lasang again became a monotonous, dreary, and dragging routine. They walked a mile or so from the camp to the airfield in bare feet on a gravel road with a knife-like layer of rocks. At the end of the day they walked back again, usually with bloodied feet, exhausted from the work in the heat. Throughout it all, they were constantly under the watch of brutal guards who were looking for the slightest provocation.[4]

This had been the daily routine for six months. They had now been prisoners for a long time. It was a time when a POW would be looking for some reason to have hope, and then that reason came.

On August 17, 1944, after the lights were out, the prisoners heard a sound in the darkness that initially seemed like the buzzing of a distant insect. Murray Sneddon, a prisoner at Lasang, recounts what he and the other POWs heard that evening. The reaction of the other POWs was likely similar to his:

Once it disappeared completely, but soon emerged again sounding a little bit louder. I was certain the noise was increasing in volume and I began to feel more and more sure that it sounded like a distant airplane, and not just any airplane, . . . an American airplane. I knew Japanese engines had individual exhaust ports jutting from each cylinder; this gave the plane a rapid popping sound somewhat similar to a motorcycle. American planes, on the other hand, had collector rings around the engine, which received exhaust from each cylinder and fed the expended fuel out a single exhaust port. The resultant sound was a constant and continuous drone, just like the plane that was circling over our heads this very moment.

I knew every man in the barrack was awake, despite the fact that not a sound could be heard from any of them. Their attention was riveted to the sound above us. . . . Our ears were suddenly attracted to a new sound—the rushing sound of heavy objects plunging down through the night air—and then the sharp staccato explosions as bombs slammed into the airfield that we had been working on only a few hours ago. This was the proof we had been waiting for. After an eternity of two and one-half years we now knew: Our forces were returning to take us home!

Thank God! Thank God! Thank God! At last our most fervent prayer was being answered: life was taking on a new dimension. My eyes brimmed with tears of joy, and my thoughts flashed homeward. Maybe our long-hoped-for day of freedom was closer than we dared think.[5]

This was great news, but the hopeful expectation that the Allies might soon be coming also left the prisoners with a sobering thought—they were probably now in great danger. If the Allies were to invade, what would their Japanese captors do? Would their captors simply abandon them, take them to Japan as hostages, or kill them all before leaving?

The POWs had good reasons to be afraid, as evidenced by what the Japanese military did at another camp just a few months later. On December 14, 1944, more than 150 POWs at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp in Palawan, an island near the Philippines, were ordered into trenches, purportedly to keep them safe from Allied bombers—that were, in fact, not coming. While the POWs were in the trenches, their Japanese captors poured aviation fuel over them and set them on fire while simultaneously raking them with gunfire and tossing grenades at the entrances to the trenches. All were murdered except for a few who managed to survive by appearing dead.[6]

This was the feared Japanese Army’s way of closing a prison in advance of an Allied invasion: simply annihilating all the POWs en masse without leaving any traces.[7] While the POWs at Lasang would not have known of these incidents or this policy of POW annihilation, they were sufficiently familiar with the Japanese Army to suspect and fear such a plan.[8]

The level of anxiety among the POWs at Lasang was not lessened by what happened the following day—or rather what did not happen. In contradiction to everything they had previously experienced from the Japanese, when the POWs assembled for work at the front gate the next morning, they were told that it was a holiday and there would be no work. The prisoners were told to remain in camp. The same thing happened the next day. Something else roused the POWs’ suspicion: there were fewer Japanese around, as many of the guards had left.[9] Clearly, things were about to change.

Notes

[1] Sneddon, Zero Ward, 53–63; Brown and Zundel, “George Robin Brown . . . His Story,” 20–21.

[2] Nordin, We Were Next to Nothing, 123–24.

[3] Nordin, 122–23.

[4] Sneddon, Zero Ward, 59.

[5] Sneddon, Zero Ward, 66–67. Hayes Bolitho also makes references to this bombing, although his account differs slightly from Sneddon’s account. Bolitho writes that work was discontinued on the airfield on August 4, which was after the bombing, but the POWs were not moved out of the camp until August 19, 1944. Bolitho, “Japanese POW Story,” part 5, 3. See also Michno, Hellships, 225–26 (similar to Bolitho’s account but states that the POWs left on August 20).

[6] Sides, Ghost Soldiers, 7–12; Michno, Hellships, 272–73; Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, 116 (describes a similar incident at Wake Island).

[7] Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 324–25. Documents discovered after the war indicate that the long-standing policy of the Japanese military was that if the commander of a POW camp believed his location might fall to the enemy, he was to kill all POWs first and leave no traces of them. Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, 114–16.

[8] See, e.g., Parkinson and Benson, Soldier Slaves, 156 (comments of POW Harold Poole).

[9] Sneddon, Zero Ward, 69.