Girocho

A GI's Story of Bataan and Beyond

John Henry Poncio, Marlin Young

• Editorial: LSU Press
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807165195
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World War II

After surviving the brutal Bataan Death March in spring 1942, Louisiana native John Henry Poncio spent the remainder of World War II as a Japanese prisoner, first at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines and later at Hirohata in Japan. In those three and a half years, U.S. Army Air Corps sergeant Poncio suffered severe beatings, starvation, disease, and emotional and psychological abuse at the hands of his captors. However, his resiliency, sense of humor, and cunning helped him to persist and to recover from the traumatic events without rancor toward the Japanese. In Girocho, he relates his experiences as a POW with touching honesty, vividly describing the harsh conditions he and his comrades endured as well as the sometimes-funny clashes with Japanese culture.
Girocho was a samurai who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, a Japanese Robin Hood. Early on, Poncio was given this name in jest by one of the prison guards, and it suited him perfectly. During his internment, he took part in a vast smuggling operation that brought food, money, mail, and other supplies into the POW camps; he reported enemy troop movements to Filipino guerrillas and participated in acts of sabotage. He and the other prisoners worked together incessantly to subvert the Japanese war effort even under the threat of death, going so far as to bury expensive calibration equipment in wet cement and build irregular gears for planes. To frustrate their captors and to stay alive, the American POWs developed the technique "going Asiatic" — maintaining a blank expression during interrogations and beatings and escaping mentally for a time. Although he and his fellow captives were treated with cruelty by many, Poncio recalls the camaraderie of the prisoners and encounters with humane guards and kind civilians, proving his remarkable gift for finding the positive in the most dire of situations.
Girocho is an inspiring memoir, transcribed verbatim by Poncio's wife, Inez, from nine hours of cassettes Poncio recorded some years after the war. Marlin Young verified her uncle's stories, placed them in chronological order, and set them within the greater context of the war, creating a compelling tale of one soldier's courage, honor, and resolve to overcome life as a prisoner of war. Their book is a fitting tribute to the POWs in the Pacific, who fought in their unique way for the U.S. war effort, their friends, and their very lives.

1 Lightning Strikes Twice

HIROHATA, JAPAN, AUGUST 1945

For weeks, a dreary, smoky shroud had hung over our Japanese prison camp, blotting out the sun and doing nothing to alleviate the all-pervading, gloomy atmosphere. Finally, the east wind began to clear it away. Patches of blue appeared here and there. But the air held something else—you could feel it. Maybe an end to the misery we called life, maybe not. God knows we had waited long enough. Normally, I would have been chomping at the bit to get on with it. But today I just wanted to go back to bed. In the past four years, I’d lived a lifetime. I looked eighty; I felt a hundred.

I eased my body onto the hard wooden bench built along the outside of the barracks and closed my eyes. Going “Asiatic”—the old trick of the mind that helped me escape reality so many times before—came easily to me. Before I knew it, the dreamlike state transported me back in time to the Philippines and to May 1942.

Facing the enemy, in torn and ragged coveralls, I stood at attention with twelve other American prisoners in front of the Filipino schoolhouse. Greenbottle flies buzzed my shaved head, nose-diving into the sweat trickling down my face. The terrific heat generated by a relentless sun sapped what little strength we had left; most of us could barely stand.

Only a few weeks before, our American-Filipino forces had surrendered to the Japanese after four months of brutal fighting on empty stomachs in the jungles of Bataan. The forced march that followed was a living nightmare. Wounded by a sniper the day of the surrender and still suffering crippling bouts of diarrhea from the polluted drinking water, by some miracle I had made it to this point, but this twenty-three-year-old Sicilian was hungry and mad as hell!

Several of the Japanese officers, dressed in khakis, peaked caps and leggings looked on from the shade of the porch as their interpreter addressed us. “Because your Amelican names are difficurt to pronounce, you will be renamed,” he said in a singsong voice. Stepping up to me, he pinned a ribbon inscribed in kana, or Japanese characters, to the frayed edges of my collar. “From this day forward, you will be called Girocho, after famous samurai in folklore who stole from rich and gave to poor.”

I almost laughed in his face. Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. Just call me Robin Hood. Looking straight into his almond-shaped eyes, I silently told him, Frankly, you son of a bitch, I don’t care what you call me as long as you feed me.

My buddy was next. “You are velly tall, with hairy chest, so you will be Girocho’s number-one man, Omasa.” I could only guess what Laurence was thinking.

The emperor’s man went down the line, stopping to pin a name on each man’s collar. The little impromptu ceremony caused a lot of snickering and jabbering among the onlookers; no doubt it was their idea of a joke.

A sudden commotion in the camp’s compound put an end to my trance, propelling me into the present. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes. For the last year and a half I’d been held in a POW camp situated outside the small village of Hirohata, a few miles from the Inland Sea of Japan. But in the past few weeks the picture kept changing so fast that it was getting harder and harder to keep up.

I could see the guys gravitating toward the gate. It irritated me. I wanted to stay with the dream. Believe it or not, that brief period I spent known as “Girocho” hadn’t been too bad. Sadly, it was all downhill after that. Curiosity kills cats, I reminded myself. No doubt, the itch to see what lay on the other side of the hill, colliding with world events, had almost done this cat in. But, I could never stand suspense.

Dragging my mind back from the past, I limped over to the fence, urged on by something I couldn’t name. As I elbowed my way through the unresisting crowd, the stunned look on my comrades’ faces made me uneasy. Then, I got a load of the poor bastards choking the road in front of the camp. “My God!” I said.

For months, literally thousands of American B-29s had flown over our area day and night. Huge Superfortresses, flying in parallel formations like flocks of geese heading south, carried out their missions in wave after wave, dropping tons of incendiaries on the cities and towns below.

When the bombs struck the immediate vicinity of our camp and the village of Hirohata, friends and family members of the local guards began to die in the raids. Nasty to begin with, the guards stepped up their brutal treatment of the prisoners. “Amelicans, no good!” they would scream, knocking those of us within range across the shoulders or over the head with their clubs. “Takusan no bakugeki ga kuru. Soshite, takusan no nihonjin ga shinu” (Many bombers come. Many Japanese die). “Okuno kokumin ga shinu daro” (Many people in country die). In their grief, they beat us, inflicting their unique brand of punishment without mercy.

The night our bombers struck the nearby city of Himeji, all of us were dead asleep when the door of the barracks crashed open and the Jap guard switched on the light. Sick, barely alive, we groaned and tried to shield our eyes from the glare. The enraged guard stood in the middle of the aisle, swinging his bat, threatening to kill everyone in the barracks. “Tenko [reveille],” he yelled. “Speedo, speedo!” Most of us couldn’t move fast enough to suit him, so he clubbed us or kicked us with his hobnail boots. His friends joined in the fun, shoving us, punching us, sending some of us sprawling into the courtyard as we filed out of the building to witness the spectacle.

A column of fire, easily five miles in diameter, resembled a blast from hell, shooting up into the clouds and maybe heaven itself. It gave off an eerie orange glow, lighting up the faces of the men around me. Like the sound of an immense fiery tornado destroying everything in its path, the roar of the flames filled the air as they engulfed the city. The scene was indescribable. We just stood there, gaping at the holocaust, unable to speak.

Shortly after that, the planes stopped flying over. Days went by, but the skies remained empty. What could it mean? Is the war over? we wondered. If so, who won?

Rumors flew. Unbelievable rumors. We heard something about a “lightning bomb.” “Pika don, pika don,” the guards screamed at us. A bomb so powerful it completely wiped out cities. We heard about astronomical death tolls in places where hardly anyone survived. We didn’t buy it. But now the terrible sight of hundreds of dazed and zombielike refugees streaming by the camp finally convinced us that something terrible must have happened.

It seemed impossible that only a few months before we had watched another procession come down this same road. On that beautiful fall day in 1944, happy and carefree Japanese men and women paraded in their finery in front of our camp, singing and dancing to the music of pipes and drums. The sound of the noisy, laughing crowd, celebrating the festival of their rice god, carried for miles on the crystal-clear air. But on this day, the air carried the unmistakable odor of burned flesh and the peculiar sound made by scores of geta (wooden shoes) crunching on gravel. Now and then a child whimpered.

We stared in horror at the people whose scorched strips of clothing hung like ribbons from their bodies—in many cases, the fabric was fused to their skin. They looked as if they had been very badly sunburned. The shock on their faces and the pain and misery reflected in their eyes aroused genuine sympathy in the silent men who watched. But the sight of them also filled me with dread as the full realization of our predicament began to set in. The camp authorities repeatedly warned us that if America invaded Japan, they would execute all prisoners without fail. The way they said it made your flesh crawl.

I also remembered all the times I saw civilians practice with burned and sharpened bamboo sticks: trained from childhood to attack us in suicidal hand-to-hand combat, if it came to that. The thought made sleep impossible.

During the entire period of my imprisonment, eagle-eyed Japs kept close watch over us. We felt their presence even while we slept. But several days later, on August 15, the compound was mysteriously empty. We found our jailers, army soldiers and civilian guards alike, standing inside headquarters, heads bowed, listening to the radio. A couple of the prisoners who spoke fluent Japanese eased over and eavesdropped outside the window. They heard the emperor of Japan addressing the Japanese people, telling them the war was over, Japan had lost, and he had surrendered to the United States. He praised his subjects, saying they had done their best, but he warned them not to retaliate or hold out in any way.

We had won the war! But we could take no comfort in the fact. The day we had waited for so long meant almost nothing. Even the smallest gesture on our part, a smile or a V for victory sign, might bring them down on our heads. Instead of a victory celebration, the universal question on everybody’s mind seemed to be: What stops them from lining us up against a wall and shooting us—or worse yet, chopping off our heads (threats made by the more sadistic guards)?

Cynical men—some bitter, some hopeless, others seemingly hardened beyond redemption—now just sounded scared. They whispered to each other in endless conversations: “What do you think’s gonna happen? Will they torture us before they finally kill us?”

Someone asked me what I thought. It didn’t pay to tell him, so I just shrugged. To myself I said, Hey, John, you old so and so, some luck you got. You’ve spent all this time using every trick you knew to stay alive for just one more lousy day, only to wind up dead after we’ve won the war!

The situation looked bad. I couldn’t count the times we had witnessed the enemy’s arrogance and been the object of their senseless cruelty—an arrogance stemming from the fanatical pride in their race and their devout worship of country.

The next twenty-four hours would be a living hell for everyone in camp. Knowing from experience that their rigidly obeyed Bushido Code could roughly be translated as, “We’d rather lose ass than face,” each man prepared himself the best way he could and waited for the end.

2 The Beginning of the End

Rumor had it that the code name for military operations in the Philippines read PLUM. For once, the scuttlebutt proved right. PLUM stood for Philippines, Luzon, Manila. But after the first few weeks on Bataan—“at government expense”—we decided we had been sent “PLUM straight to hell!”

In retrospect, none of what happened after we left the West Coast in the fall of 1941 should have come as a great surprise. The signs were all there. In a short time, the future I had mapped out suddenly took a left turn. As every GI knows, snafu (situation normal, all fouled up) is standard military issue. For me, it was becoming a way of life.

When Hitler marched into Poland in 1939, I was twenty-one years old and an aeronautical-engineering student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I had spent three years in the National Guard (I lied about my age and joined at seventeen), was an expert marksman, and had risen to the position of assistant coach of the ROTC Rifle Team in my second year in that program at LSU. On September 1, 1939, when we got word of the invasion, the team was competing in the National Rifle Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio.

Many of us predicted that before it was all over, America would become involved in the war in Europe. Within a month I decided to quit school and enlist in the Army Air Corps—a total force of about twenty-two hundred men at the time.

I was fortunate to be assigned to the 13th Bombardment Squadron at Barksdale Field in Shreveport, Louisiana, only a few hours from my hometown of Morgan City. I also went through boot camp at Barks-dale. Three months later I got promoted to mechanic. Raise in pay: $6.00 a month.

By the fall of 1940, Europe was under siege by the Germans. Paris had fallen, and the battle of Britain was launched, with London under aerial attack. It became increasingly apparent that America would be drawn into the war.

About that time, my commanding officer selected me as a candidate for bombardier, to be trained in the use of the new, top-secret Norden bombsight. This was not a volunteer assignment; all the men in the program were hand-picked and their backgrounds checked out by the army before they were sent to Savannah Army Airfield in Georgia for training.

Before leaving for Savannah, I went home to visit my paternal grandparents, who had immigrated to this country from Italy in the 1880s. Although they spoke English with a heavy accent, they owned and operated a small grocery store in Morgan City.

My father died in the 1918–19 flu epidemic that swept this country. Since I was the only grandson and “figlio la gaddina bianca”—an old Sicilian saying that means “the child of the white chicken”—I spent long periods of time with Grandma and Grandpa from an early age and finished high school while living with them. They doted on me, brought me up as a son, gave me a strong sense of identity, and tried to endow me with some of their faith and courage—strengths I would need again and again in the months and years to come.

A few days before my furlough ended, I got a haircut. The barber, who was also the town’s chief of police, asked me if I liked the air corps.

“Yeah, sure,” I answered.

“Tell me the truth, now—are you in trouble, or something?” he continued.

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“A couple of FBI men have been snooping around, asking questions. They wanted to know about your character, your habits and the like. I hear they even talked to your grandparents.”

“Oh, Lord, I’m in trouble now,” I said, laughing.

“Don’t worry, boy,” he said with a chuckle. “I didn’t tell ’em everything I know!”

Although background checks were routine for these top-secret assignments, I guess they wanted to make certain that, with the name Poncio and having been raised by Italian grandparents, I was a loyal American and not a Mussolini sympathizer.

Opportunities to make a good living and achieve some level of success were scarce during the Great Depression, especially in our sleepy southern town. Fishing was Morgan City’s main source of income; there was very little in the way of industry or business. Later, shipbuilding and the oil boom would change all that. But at the time, I felt the military offered me a chance to make something of myself. I planned to make it my career.

I enjoyed army life and the feeling of camaraderie in our squadron. Being bound by oath to keep everything we heard or learned in the classroom a secret helped forge an esprit de corps among the men. As time went by, not only did we become a team, we became good friends. I found the work interesting and challenging. We figured that when we got into the war with Germany, we’d give ’em hell!

Eager to get into the fray, I jumped at the first opportunity to fly to North Africa with a detachment to instruct the British in low-level bombing. But the day before they left, I slipped off the wing of my plane during refueling and fell, hurting my back.

The doctor examined me and said, “It’s the hospital for you, Sergeant.”

“C’mon, Doc,” I pleaded with him, seeing my big chance about to slip away. “I’ll be okay.”

“No,” he insisted. “We’d better keep you for a few days. This kind of injury could come back to haunt you.”

No appeal could sway him. I tried every argument in the book, but no soap!

The night before the men left, my pal Red dropped by the hospital ward to say goodbye. The grin on his face belied his words of sympathy. “Hey, John. Tough break, man! I know how you must feel. But I just got the word. Guess I’ll be going in your place.”

Before dawn the next morning, I lay in my hospital bed listening to the transport take off, sorrier than hell I couldn’t go with them.

Up for promotion to staff sergeant, with a pay raise, in October 1941, and prompted by my girl’s ultimatum—“Either a new car or a new girl, John. I’m developing muscles in all the wrong places from pushing this jalopy up the hills”—I decided to replace my old Ford wreck with a beauty of an automobile, a 1939 LaSalle—an even snazzier car than the base commander’s!

But just a few days before my promotion, I was shanghaied into the 91st Bombardment Squadron. The duties of this new armament unit, formed by picking several men from each air corps squadron, would consist of arming the dive-bombers and equipping the planes with machine guns.

All my training as a bombardier would be useless. In one fell swoop, I lost not only my flight pay and the raise due a staff sergeant, but the opportunity to become an officer later when the air force commissioned all bombardiers.

I had to sell my car for half the cost. Even worse, the 13th went back to Barksdale in Shreveport, while I shipped out to t...