Oral History Interview with William H. Gentry, October 1, 1992

“START OF TAPE 1. SIDE 1” Harris: Interview with William Gentry, October 1, 1992, Frankfort, Kentucky.

Kelly: You didn’t, lost him?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: And you went to UK and played on for Rupp for a little while, or Gentry: Well, a little bit.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: I was too little.

Kelly: Yeah [Chuckles – Interviewer]. How tall are you?

Gentry: Huh? I was--then I was six-one-and-a-half, I’m not that tall now.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: About six foot now.

Kelly: And ( ) through how, how, how was your friendship developed with him?

Gentry: Oh I just knew him all when I was growing up, all the way through. Arch went to the University of Kentucky.

Kelly: Did he?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Did he graduate, before you all went overseas?

Gentry: No, I think he was in his junior year.

Kelly: Was he?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: What did he major in?

Gentry: I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Kelly: Can you kind of tell us who he was? A little bit about his personality and size?

Gentry: Well Arch was a…well he, he worked in the d…he worked in the drugstore there called 1:00The Corner Drug, on Main Street, and Arch was a person that…anybody that had a story come in, want to come in and tell Arch a story and they would start the story and Arch would finish it.

Kelly: He already heard it?

Gentry: He, he, work, he had it worked out that all stories fell into just a few categories and that they were all just slightly different than they were--maybe were, forty years ago. My kids, every once in a while, I, they come in with some sort of story and I say, “yeah this is what happened.” 2:00And they’d say, “you’ve heard before,” I say “yeah, a long time ago [Laughing], that’s not a new one, they just come in around for about the third time.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: What, what, what, tell a, a little bit about his personality and… Gentry: Well, Arch was a…very calm, easygoing fellow. I never, I never saw him angry, never. He was…a person that you know, if you had a job to do, he was ready to do his part, whatever it was. And he was just--of course he came from a fine family.

Kelly: Was he married?

Gentry: Arch? No, uh-uh, no.

Kelly: And (clears throat)…He was at Cabanatuan with you when they loaded on to the Oryoko?

Gentry: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: Were you aware that, the fact that he was in the group to leave?

Gentry: Oh yeah, they, all the ci…they all came down to say goodbye.

Kelly: Okay. They, being who?

Gentry: Well, anybody in the battalion.

Kelly: Who were they? Who were the, the boys from Harrodsburg in particular that came down to say goodbye 3:00to you… Gentry: Oh… Kelly: …that you recall Goodpaster, was he… Gentry: I have to I have to stop and think now.

Kelly: Goodpaster one of them came by to see you before you left?

Gentry: Probably, but I don’t remember that very… Kelly: Arch did?

Gentry: Oh yeah, Arch, yeah.

Kelly: Do you remember what he said, or what the conversation was?

Gentry: No, no, just that he was going on a work detail and they didn’t know what it would, they didn’t know where they were going, but… Kelly: Was he (clears throat) in a real bad shape, or fairly good shape, or… Gentry: Well he was in a fair shape then, yeah… Kelly: Compared to… Gentry: …compared to the rest of, the rest of the prisoners, yeah.

Kelly: About how tall was he and what did he weigh?

Gentry: Arch, I would say, Arch was about five-ten.

Kelly: And when he went in, what did he weigh?

Gentry: Oh he weighed, a hundred… Kelly: Sixty-five?

Gentry: …seventy-five, eighty pounds.

Kelly: What did he weigh when you s…said goodbye to him there or he just came down and said goodbye to you?

Gentry: Oh [Chuckling] he, he was probably thirty pounds lighter.

Kelly: Was he?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Would you have recognized him?

Gentry: Oh yeah, well… Kelly: You had been around him there.

Gentry: Yeah, we, we’d been in the camp there for sometime, see.

Kelly: Yeah. Did you and he work together on some of those…creative things that you all were working on?

Gentry: Oh no-no, this was, the things like making the fields and…that was done in, 4:00by the one’s of us that were in a amebic dysentery ward. We, you know, we were behin…we were in a separate place with a barb-wire fence… Kelly: Were you?

Gentry: …see, yeah.

Kelly: So you, you, you, that’s what you told me a few minutes ago when, when I was asking you whether Jack Reed could have been right about meeting General Yamashita coming down and speaking to him, you said you were, is that where you were at that time?

Gentry: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: So you were separated from that group… Gentry: Right, mm-mm.

Kelly: …so it might have occurred and you wouldn’t have known it.

Gentry: Yeah, it could have, yeah.

Kelly: Yeah. Let me ask a couple of questions then, Russell Harris wants to ask you some questions (clears throat). Do you know what Jack Reed wife’s name was?

Gentry: Oh, Joanna.

Kelly: Joanna. And what was her maiden name?

Gentry: (Coleman?).

Kelly: (Coleman?)?

Gentry: Is that right? Yeah, well, see.

Kelly: You’re right, you’re sure about the Joanna anyway.

Gentry: Yeah but she lived with, she lived with (Minnie Ball Goddard?) Now, let’s see I’ve, I’ve 5:00got to go back here a little bit [Laughing] I got to get my recall system in operation. Yeah, she was Joanna (Coleman?), and she lived with (Minnie Ball Goddard?). (Minnie Ball Goddard?) lived just outside of…going out of Harrodsburg on a, Lexington Pike, a big huge stone house that was…I think that house was built by the president of Beaumont College, if I am not mistaken, and I think that’s right.

Kelly: Right here by Beaumont College? The one out… Gentry: Oh no-no, no, no, this is going out of town toward, toward Lexington. My mother was in the last class at Beaumont College.

Kelly: Okay (clears throat) when the Rangers came, you were there. Quinn was there?

Gentry: Uh-huh. And Jack Reed Kelly: Jack Reed and 6:00 Royalty.

Gentry: Yeah, Gilbert Royalty.

Kelly: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about… Gentry: And Charlie Quinn.

Kelly: Yeah, and Charlie Quinn.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Okay, tell me a little bit about Charlie Quinn who he was and… Gentry: Well, Charlie… Kelly: …and Royalty.

Gentry: …I, I knew Charlie from being in the National Guard, but he was always a very proficient… Kelly: ( ).

Gentry: …well mannered, always seemed it, to come from a, a good family, he was just, just a real nice person.

Kelly: And Royalty.

Gentry: Gilbert Royalty.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Well, poor Gilbert. He is…well, I don’t know whether I should even say this or not, but anyway, as far as everybody was concerned, he was just one degree above moron.

Kelly: Is that right?

Gentry: Yeah. He was permanent KP, if you want to put it that way, that’s about what he could do. 7:00Kelly: Learning disabilities?

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm.

Kelly: Yeah, did he go to school, or did he get very far in school, or do you know?

Gentry: Oh, I don’t think he got very far in school, I’m not sure, but I don’t think he did.

Kelly: But, but (clears throat) were all, all those guys with you on that…march to freedom, after the Rangers came in there, those guys we just talked about, Quinn?

Gentry: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: They were all there.

Gentry: Yeah, uh-huh.

Kelly: And all got out.

Gentry: Yeah, uh-huh.

Kelly: Okay. And (clears throat) on the, on the Death March itself, at one time, Reed said that somewhere a, a…pretty far along, that he ran into you, and (Harlow?) and (Gray?) 8:00Gentry: (Gray?) I don’t know (Gray?) wasn’t, they were at the same time we were, I don’t think. Oh yeah on the Death March!

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Oh-oh, I was thinking about going, I was thinking about the night we were liberated.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Well that’s very possible.

Kelly: Uh-huh. He said you all talked a little, and… Gentry: Oh I’m sure we talked.

Kelly: Yeah, talked about whether or not you were going to make it, or… Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: …what you ought to do, whether you ought to try to escape.

Gentry: I don’t remember us talk, talking about any escape.

Kelly: You know you, you had malaria up there some place where you… Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: …you disconnected and didn’t remember anything.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: I, I don’t know… Gentry: Bertrand and…Bertrand and…oh, (Marefield?) got me along through a couple of three days there, I don’t even remember. I d…I remember going into this warehouse and it had a concrete floor in it, a pretty good size building, and we were going in, everybody was you know, trying to keep a little space, but they, you could hear them, hollering back the door, “move up, move up, they’re killing them out here,” see. And so everybody kept crowding in and you were crowded, you know, shoulder to shoulder in this building, it was a, it had metal sides on it, 9:00and a metal roof, and oh boy, did it get hot in there! But I passed out, and… Kelly: About where was that? Do you remember where it was?

Gentry: Well it was up here somewhere, it was along here, but I don’t remember where.

Kelly: Up in here somewhere.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Up around all of them Pilar?

Gentry: Yeah, at Orion and Pilar.

Kelly: Pilar.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Is that the way to pronounce it?

Gentry: Yeah, that’s the way the Filipinos pronounce it.

Kelly: Orion?

Gentry: Yeah. Well it was in, it was in this section in here somewhere, and now see… Kelly: Do you remember seeing Reed on the march?

Gentry: Off hand, no.

Kelly: No. Do you remember Harlow?

Gentry: N…off hand, no. I, I probably, pro…probably 10:00 did.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: You know.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: But… Kelly: At that moment, you don’t remember.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Yeah, okay.

Gentry: You know, trying to remember back to that.

Kelly: Yeah, yeah.

Gentry: But anyway, they, they rushed us in, crammed us into this building and I passed out from the malaria and when I came to, I was laying down and there were three people standing and straddling me and the guy standing right, right in, over my head…had already started the, the dysentery that go along with starvation and the stuff was dripping out of his pants right in my face.

Kelly: Really?

Gentry: Yeah. And I knew I had to get up… Kelly: wo, wo, were they… Gentry: …and from there, from that… Kelly: …were they standing there to help you or just standing there because of the space?

Gentry: Space, we were standing shoulder to shoulder. There were so many of us, and I was, you see, another 11:00thing, see they would move, I was in a group that they moved us, they moved us north, and they’d move us south and put us in the gun position, we would set around the guns.

Kelly: Trying to keep them… Gentry: Keep Corregidor from firing on them, I reckon, I guess they figured that Corregidor had enough intelligence to know that we were there and would not fire. But I don’t think Corregidor knew that because they fired anyway.

Harris: How often did they move you south?

Gentry: Oh, two or three times. Oh they, we would go north and then they’d turn you around and send you back south.

Harris: And you’d stay there a day or so?

Gentry: Oh yeah, well see it was twelve days for me to get from, from here, all the way in to the prison camp, twelve days, so, during that twelve days, we…moved about three or four times.

Kelly: Looking at this map, describe your route, so as you can find it on the map, just 12:00hitting the high points here, so… Gentry: Well… Kelly: …so we can kind of follow you.

Gentry: Okay. Well to surrender, I was at General (Briars?) headquarters… Kelly: Which was very close to the… Gentry: …I, I was attached to br…General (Briars?) division, see.

Kelly: …which was right close to the, to the (core?) boundary.

Gentry: Yeah, right.

Kelly: And just below the front line… Gentry: Yes.

Kelly: …and kind of in the center of the peninsula.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Okay.

Gentry: See, there is a river comes in there, where is that, yeah, it was up there (paper shuffling sound)…one of them here shows that. Where are the one with the pockets, one of the copies says, here, here is that river, (Briars?) headquarters was, was right here, you see, right there.

Kelly: That’s where you went on the Death March? When the Death March started?

Gentry: Yeah, right here.

Kelly: Okay, and you, you’re right close to that big pocket.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: And…that river is called, how do you pronounce it.

Gentry: Tuau.

Kelly: Tuau River.

Gentry: Tuau.

Kelly: And, and you went from there west, westward over to the west coast?

Gentry: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: All right, go ahead and just kind of describe it… Gentry: Yeah, okay, see… Kelly: …and, and name the places where you went.

Gentry: …we came right back to here. Now let’s see…came back to here… Kelly: This is south of…this dam right here is what?

Gentry: Bagac.

Kelly: Okay, south of there and, and…keep going.

Gentry: Yeah, all right. Then, then we…I joined back up with the battalion… Kelly: Mm-mm, this… Gentry: …the battalion assembled here.

Kelly: That’s the 192nd.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Mm-mm, but D Company is not with them.

Gentry: Yeah C Company, 13:00a 190th.

Kelly: Okay but, but not D-company from the Harrodsburg unit.

Gentry: No-no.

Kelly: That’s them.

Gentry: They were over here somewhere.

Kelly: Okay, all right.

Gentry: And…so we assembled the battalion, and then…after we got in there, (Wickard?) told me to ( ) one day he says, “you take, you take the truck, and you go north and find a Japanese officer to surrender to.” See, and we hadn’t seen a Japanese back in that area… Kelly: Right.

Gentry: …at all, see. So I went north and got to the, the river which was up here (shuffling paper sound) went to the next river up where he was--would be, I don’t know whether they show it on these or not. 14:00Well, anyway, there is a r…I went north… Kelly: Okay.

Gentry: …on the, on the west road, see, and until I came to a river, and it’s probably this river right here.

Kelly: This might show it.

Gentry: Yeah, there, see there is a river right there?

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: See, and it’s probably that river right there.

Kelly: It’s just south of… Gentry: Yeah, okay.

Kelly: …just south of this town, what… Gentry: Yeah, ba… Kelly: …what’s the name of this town?

Gentry: …Bagac.

Kelly: Bagac Okay, all right.

Gentry: Yeah, okay.

Kelly: All right.

Gentry: I went north to that river and at that river I found Japanese taking baths, and I stopped, got out, and, and started asking for somebody to speak English. 15:00Finally one Japanese came up and I told him that I was looking for an officer to surrender to him. So Colonel (Wickard?) said that I should find a, a, a colonel to surrender to. Well, I told them that, that I had to have a field officer, grade officer, and of course I don’t guess they understood that, but anyway, here came an officer and about six Japanese and they crawled up in the back of that truck with me. And we went back to…where the battalion was assembled, and we got in there and we had a, the Japanese had an interpreter with him. And I remember Colonel (Wickard?) ask him, the Japanese interpreter what to, the officer’s rank was, and he said, “same o ju,” [Chuckles – Intervi ewer] see, and (Wickard?) said, “well, that’s fine,” he said, “you did a beautiful job,” [Chuckling] see [Chuckling] when I get down to ( ) and it’s just the same 16:00Japanese, he is a first lieutenant [Chuckling].

Kelly: Huh, huh, by the way, we’re talking to Bill Gentry, and I’m Colonel Arthur L. Kelly, and Russell Harris is here. Keep going.

Gentry: [Chuckling] So then, then af…after we assembled there and the Japanese came in and he told us to go to Mariveles. So then we started down the, the west coast to Mariveles, and at Mariveles they put us out on the beach.

Kelly: Did that road have a number or just called the west road?

Gentry: Oh just, I don’t, we, we always referred to it as the west road.

Kelly: Okay, keep going, Mariveles.

Gentry: Yeah, we were at Mariveles, and we were there for about two days without any water or anything, any food, and…then we started marching, and we, we marched up here to about Lamao.

Kelly: Went by Cabcaben…you went down south.

Gentry: Huh, yeah-yeah, Cabcaben, we went by Cabcaben up to about Lamao and, and we were going 17:00along between Cabcaben and Lamao, the Corregidor were shelling that road, and we lost, lost by the name of Bradford from the 194th, and (Loud tapping sounds), my mind going blank, one of our officers from the hundred-ninety-second that’s on the tip of my tongue and can’t get it off.

Kelly: Janesville, or… Gentry: Yeah, he was from Janesville, yeah, and he was first lieutenant. We buried him right there, and…(Bloomfield?) died of heat exhaustion from running. He was running because they were shelling and, and he was running and he just got so hot.

Kelly: He is lieutenant?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: And from where?

Gentry: From Janesville.

Kelly: Janesville… Gentry: Uh-huh.

Kelly: …Wisconsin, and this above… Gentry: Above Lamao.

Kelly: And below… Gentry: Limay.

Kelly: Okay and between those two points.

Gentry: Now, at this point, from, from, from Mariveles to this point, we did not have a guard, we didn’t ha…we didn’t s…we didn’t have any Japanese with us at all, and at Limay is where we s…where the Japanese picked us up and started us marching, that’s where, as far as I’m concerned, is, is the where the Death March really started, was right there.

Kelly: For you. Now some of them did have them over here to Mariveles so.

Gentry: Huh?

Kelly: Some of them did start with guards at Mariveles, right? 18:00Gentry: Huh, maybe later.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: See.

Kelly: Yeah, okay.

Gentry: And we started out and there we…and the group I was in was all officers at this point.

Kelly: Is that right?

Gentry: Yeah, Colonel (Wickard?) was with us…they we…it was all officer, not all hundred-and ninety-second, or hundred-and ninety-fourth, but there were a lot of other officers with, and we started, we just started out as a group and they told us to march, you see.

Kelly: Keep going. You go up to (that road?)… Gentry: Now then, then we picked up the guards, and then, that’s where we s…they, we started seeing the ones killed and maimed and all that business, so.

Kelly: So, go to…how do you pronounce that little town there?

Gentry: Orion.

Kelly: Orion? Pilar?

Gentry: Pilar, Abucay, and that one I, I, I don’t know that I ever knew the name, that would be (Madem, Mademtan?) Kelly: This, this one up here?

Gentry: Hermosa.

Kelly: Okay, and that’s out, out of the, just of the…peninsula, right? No, it’s not correct.

Gentry: No, no, no! You’ve got to go up here at the Layac Junction.

Kelly: Yeah, okay, all right (clears throat), Russell has got some questions for you.

Gentry: All right.

Harris: Oh, okay. 19:00You know, when we talked on the phone, several months ago, I said I needed more information about the, the environment in Harrodsburg before the war, what it was like 20:00living there, the values of that the men absorbed and took with them. Do you recall that?

Harris: Yeah, well, of course it, you know, Harrodsburg has always, always been and still is for a m…well of course it got more industry now, it got industry now, but at that time we didn’t have any real industry in town, at all other than Cudahy had, well we had Cudahy Packing Company had taken over about the time that we left. We had a…a butter plant, cream plant…and would, and we just…place that collected chickens, Mr. Elmore (Robinson?) ran it. His son later became a colonel in the air force. I think he retired as a colonel. He c…he bought chickens, he ran, he had an icehouse. He bought…cream and butter, made butter out of it, and ice cream, and…of course we, other than that would be 21:00lumberyards or something like that, we didn’t, there wasn’t much industry at that time.

Harris: So it was basically a farming…area.

Gentry: Basically a farming community, right.

Harris: Mm-mm, mm-mm. That’s similar to the kind of place I grew up and I, I know that work, work in itself is valued very highly, just, just for itself. Did…when you were growing up there, did that seem to you that work was something that people valued just because you were a good worker?

Gentry: Oh yes, yes. You see the, the people that lived out on the farms, and now we’re talking about…tenant farmers, 22:00they were on the farms because they would work. The ones that wouldn’t work lived on, lived in town, and they would just go out, work for this farmer today and another farmer tomorrow, whoever had something to do. But, you know, there were people that…no landlord would want, you know, they wouldn’t want them to be there, of course you, you, there weren’t a lot of them, you know, and most of them all lived on one street, see…in town, over, that’s the whites, and now the blacks lived over in another section. And when I was growing up, you know, your word was your bond. If you said you were going to do something, that’s what you did, you know.

Harris: So, our persons, 23:00the way a person was regarded by the rest of the community depended on whether he was a dependable worker or whether he kept his word or not?

Gentry: Mm-mm. Honor was, you know, honor was the thing and…I don’t know whether, I think I’ve, I think we probably covered this before, when we first went to Fort Knox, the very first night, we had to share a, D-Company had to share a latrine with B-Company because all the, the la…latrines weren’t all finished and the boys from Chicago…they were just, their handling of the English language was just a little bit different, and it created one a lot of fights in one night.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: And, in fact it got to the point where we ran B-Company back in the barracks and [Chuckling] told them to stay there [Chuckling] and all over the, just the word ‘son-of-the-bitch,’ now ‘son-of-the-bitch’ at, at that time, and as far as anybody in Harrodsburg was concerned, you didn’t use that word, because that was… Kelly: Fighting words ( ).

Gentry: …that was not only fighting words, that was killing words [Chuckling].

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: And these boys from…Chicago come in and they didn’t know the boys from D-Company from Adam, but, you know, he’d say, “how are you, 24:00you son-of-the-bitch, and that started a fight, right there, see.

Harris: The…it seems like, you know, small environment like…like say Mercer County in the, in the thirties, and, and in a small environment like Company D at Fort Knox, everybody knew everybody else’s business.

Gentry: Oh yes, yes, right, mm-mm. Yeah we knew what they’d, what they did. Now we, or course we, we owned a f…my dad owned a farm and we lived on a farm, and we had…four sets 25:00of tenants that lived on the farm, four families, and which we, my dad always made sure that they had food to eat, and that they warm, and…had medication, if they needed it, anytime, but…and like in the national guard now, we had fellows that drove trucks for the county. In fact, a fellow was driving trucks, we were talking to him one time and he said that they hauled rock out onto the roads, and…late in the afternoons, in the mornings they had specific places to haul the rock, and in the afternoons they’d just loaded up and tell them to find a hole and dump it see. Well, the road that we lived on needed some attention, so we said, well, we’d, 26:00we say well, we will give you fifty cents for every load that you drop, see…on our road. So…from the, now highway one-twenty-seven, from one-twenty-seven back to where our farm was, which is about…a miles and a half, we had a real fine road.

Kelly: Where is your farm? Where was your farm located?

Gentry: It was at Jess…coming out of Harrodsburg, just before you get to McAfee it’s called Monday’s Landing Pike, so, so.

Kelly: On the right side coming up or the left side?

Gentry: It’d be on—coming which way?

Kelly: Coming north.

Gentry: Coming north, okay, would be on the right hand side.

Kelly: Just before you got to McAfee.

Gentry: Yeah, yeah, mm-mm.

Harris: So it’s south… Gentry: Well there was, there was a lane just before you got to McAfee but… Harris: Southeast of Harrodsburg?

Kelly: No, it’s north.

Gentry: It would northeast.

Harris: Northeast.

Gentry: Uh-huh.

Harris: Oh.

Kelly: How far out of town?

Gentry: It’s five miles. 27:00Kelly: Five miles?

Gentry: Mm-mm.

Kelly: That’s where you were raised?

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm.

Kelly: Is that Pioneer Farm?

Gentry: Well I started out, I started it out, and I started school at Burgin, between…we lived between Burgin and…Danville. And I, we tr…Dad bought the farm at McAfee when I was in the third grade.

Harris: You said that…your family took a, a, cared to see that the tenants were fed and taken care of, was that true of other land owners in the county?

Gentry: Well, my great uncles did that. They did that for all the people that worked for them. Now Dad, when, when we would harvest wheat, for instance, we would put me--wheat in the mill, and, and 28:00the name of this particular family, see, and whether it’d be five hundred or six hundred, or a thousand pounds of flour, see, that they would be able to go get, see, then all they had to do is go to the, go to the mill and pick up whatever flour they needed, see. We would kill hogs, and we’d kill twenty-five hogs, or…in the fall, and, or course, what we gave them would be backbones, and backbone then was the way we killed the hogs, the backbone had a lot of meat on it, we’d give them ribs…and…you know, back then, they called it headcheese or…souse or Dutch pudding where you cooked their ears and the nose and heads and, 29:00they, they’d have all the heads, and all the…ears and feet that they wanted, and they could cook those up. We always made sure that they had lard to make biscuit with, see, flour and lard, we made sure that they had that, see. And if we killed a cow, or killed any animal, sheep or anything else, we always gave them, some of the meat, see, first that much meat and… Harris: Was this practice unusual in the county, or common?

Gentry: I th…I think it would been done by a lot of people… Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: …at least that, we always did that. My dad, my dad was…always concerned about people. In fact, there was an old fellow that, that had been a stonemason all of his life, and he was out of work, and…he 30:00was very old, could hardly move, but…Dad knew that he wouldn’t want a handout, charity, so Dad said, “well how about coming and build a stone entrance to, into our place.” And I think he worked for months there, from what I remember, because I, and when I came from school in the afternoon, I’d have to go down and help him. Dad told me to help the old fellow, and I’d help him mix up concrete and, and…dress the stones and whatnot. In fact he taught me how to dress the stone and whatnot. I learned a lot from the old fellow. But he, he worked and he, he felt like he had earned the money, and he didn’t have to look at it as charity.

Harris: So he could keep his self-respect… Gentry: Yeah, right.

Harris: …by working for him.

Gentry: Mm-mm. During the depression, we had a great big house. During the depression 31:00we had a, a lady and her son, and he was…had mental problems from time to time, nothing violent or anything like that, just get confused and whatnot, and they were desperate, and Dad said, “well, you can come to live with us.” And they lived with us for a year, until get, could get things worked out to where they could go back on their own again.

Kelly: Is that house still standing?

Gentry: No, I went by, went by the other day, it’s long gone.

Kelly: The frame?

Gentry: It shows a frame house, a big house had, had ten rooms, big rooms. The bedroom that my brother and myself slept in was as big as this room. We had two, two big beds in there, and plus all the other furniture.

Harris: During the depression, I know, I studied, studied the depression, so I know that…many things were in short supply in areas like Mercer County, but food was generally available. But the, it wasn’t enough to waste 32:00by any means. Were people generally frugal with…with their food, and with their…other material things?

Gentry: Oh yeah! My mother, my mother saved everything. She saved, if she had any grease, she’d put it aside. It later became something else, maybe soap. We made our own soap, the kind of soap that you wash clothes with and wash your face, or use it for body soap, but…she saved a little bit, a little bit of everything and in fact, every year, she would, like…pick blackberries. She would can, say a hundred and fifty jars, quart jars of blackberries. All you had to do there was have the blackberries and buy some sugar to go in them, see and she, she 33:00saved every fruit jar. In fact m…we would go to auction sales and the auctioneer had a basket full of fruit jars. My mother might be on the other side of the house, but he’d always knock it off for a quarter into her [Chuckling] she’s, a lot of times I’ve heard her say, “I don’t remember buying that!” [Laughing] but she’d always take them… Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: …see, and use it in canning. Now, a lot of times we would, Dad would have the fellows pick blackberries on what we call the halves, he would furnish everything, sugar and all, for them to can their stuff and we’d get half the blackberries, see, and so that we, we furnished them with the, with sugar.

Harris: Can you think of any instances in which you had to 34:00improvise to let, make a tool that you needed, or a, a…some th…something, some way to get yourself clothes that you didn’t, didn’t have?

Gentry: Well, yeah, well of course we, we made tools all the time, big tools all the time. In our case, 35:00we had a, when I was about twelve, Dad brought us a--built my brother and myself a great big workshop. We had a shop that you could take one of these old steam tractors and drive it in there and work on it inside. It would, in fact we’ve taken them in there and fired the thing up right inside, we had a stack to go out through the roof so that we’d fire up that old steam engine right inside the building. And…my brother and myself, we made our own w…turning lathe, wood turning lathe. We had a, we built our own forge to…heat stuff, and my grandfather was a, was a blacksmith, ran a blacksmith shop…he di…he did several different things, but blacksmith shop was one of them. And he, he taught my brother and myself, you know, a great deal about blacksmithing, welding and whatnot, 36:00and…sure we made a lot of tools, plow points, you know, plow points, a lot of people, plow points would get dull, they’d just throw it away in the fence corner some place, and put another one on. We’d take it up and heat it up, and beat it out and run over it again, see, take her another round.

Harris: Was that sort of mechanical ability unusual?

Gentry: Well, yes, in a way, because a lot of the farmers, you know, would buy a tractor, and when the tractor stopped running, they‘d just walk off and leave it. My brother and myself, we, when we were young, we bought any number of tractors who had been setting, we’d watch the weeds grow up around it, and we’d go over and buy it, and most of the time, all we had to do is put a new set of points on it and stick some plugs in it and crank it up and drive it off. But, the old farmer he was all mad, because it wouldn’t run, he didn’t understand anything about it. 37:00And back then too, if a tractor, you know, if an implement dealer sold the tractor and the tractor stopped running, they’d call the implement dealer up and say, “send the man out here to get my tractor going,” and the guy would come out, put some points, and, on it, and maybe stick some new plugs in it, and then they’d send the farmer a bill and he’d have a fit about it, because…he didn’t understand that that man had to get paid for coming out there and going back, see, and…the farmers just didn’t, didn’t do anything for themselves, you know, mechanically, a lot of them didn’t. You know, they knew how to plow, how to plant, and how to harvest, and all this business, but as far as their machinery was concerned, that a lot of them didn’t know how to take care of it.

Harris: In a community like say Mercer County at that time, when everybody did know everybody else, did, were there limits well understood limits to the, what was acceptable behavior for a man who have a family and 38:00things he couldn’t do, things he could do, I know that it’s a big question, but…I’ve heard of, say a man in, in that time and place was a gambler or a drinker, and was not supporting his family (clears throat), he would be visited by…a group that would tell him to straighten up and take care of his responsibilities or, or he’d have trouble.

Gentry: Well they, you know, that, that was…where a group was concerned, I guess that was when the Ku Klux Klan was still…pretty…pretty much in operation. I can remember when I was a little boy, going one night to a field there out of Harrodsburg, between Harrodsburg and Burgin, and they burned a cross and all these fellows walking around with the sheets all over them, and 39:00white robes, whatnot, one of them came up to my dad and he said, “well how about joining up with us?” and Dad knew his voice, and he said, “Steve, if I have something to say to a person, I don’t have to have a sh…I don’t have to have a robe and a hood over my head to do it. I will go straight to that individual and talk to him, not (taping sound), not behind something else.” And but they burned the cross and all of that, but I think I was about, about nine, eight or nine years old.

Kelly: What year were you born?

Gentry: 1918.

Kelly: 1918.

Harris: So the race relations…at that time, were… Gentry: Well… Harris: …were they… Gentry: …I, I don’t know, of course, my parents had always…always counsel us on…our 40:00correct behavior, but that we, growing up should be, and, as far as race relations, Dad always told us that…that if a white and black married, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong with that, was the fact that the offspring, nobody wanted, that that was a, you know, that was a bad deal. Not for, not for the two people that got married, it was for the children, you know, and the people, the descendants after them…from that union, see. That, that was his, that was his philosophy on the thing, and of course he was always, you know, they always taught us to be truthful, always taught us to be frugal, always taught us to be clean, and my dad used to say, you know, a man can have all the patches 41:00in the world on his pants, but they should be clean, you know. If he’s got cle…if he’s got clean pants on, it don’t make any difference kind of patches on. So, keep your clothes in good shape, keep your body in good shape, so, take care or your temple that God gave you.

Harris: So this idea of responsibility was something that you were raised with and you, it became second nature to you. Is that correct?

Gentry: I, yeah, yeah, it is, because, yeah, he always taught us to, that, our, for our wo…word to be our bond. If you say you’re going to do something, you be sure you do it.

Harris: I know it’s hard to generalize, but…was that philosophy 42:00unusual in, in, in that time and place, or not?

Gentry: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. All the people that I knew were very responsible people. I, of course, I’m sure that there are a lot of people that I didn’t…never came in contact with, maybe that I didn’t go with, but…of course at that time, you know, and, and, and that place, if you owned a, if you owned a farm, if you owned a farm, you were somebody, see, and we lived on a farm, so…I guess a, you know, I know later when I started w…working at the Corning Glass Works at Harrodsburg, a lot of people said they didn’t understand why I was working at Corning Glass Work because I had so much money I didn’t have to work. I don’t know 43:00where they ever got that idea but [Laughing] I, I guess because we owned a farm, that’s the only thing that I could ever figure out, why would these people say that?

Harris: I’d like to move to the, the National Guard Company for a second. The…in the community in your civilian life, every, everybody had a pretty well define role, is that correct to say?

Gentry: In civilian life?

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: Yeah, I think so.

Harris: Okay. And in, in the guard, of course, you had pretty well defined roles. Was it easy for the men in the thirty-eighth tank company to switch from role to role, from civilian to guard and back?

Gentry: Mm, I think it was, I think it was easy. I don’t think anybody had any problem 44:00along that line.

Harris: Oh, what I mean is…say somebody in the unit might have a rank, one or two pegs higher than you are--yours, and then in civilian life your places on those social of pecking order, would be reve…reversed. Was that difficult, if that occurred, would that be difficult to switch roles…back and forth.

Gentry: No, no, uh-uh. For instance in the, in the guard…one of my best friends I’ve ever had was John (Keller?). John was in the guard, his father, his father owned a farm, and he probably maybe owned more land than we did, I, I don’t know for sure, but…John was a private, I was a sergeant, and that didn’t bother us and we, we just got along fine. We didn’t know, 45:00he knew that I was a sergeant, he knew he was a private…now whether he ever wanted to be anything other than private, I don’t know. You know, some just want to be private. Before we take, ma…maybe I’m, maybe I’m going out a limb here but, I think that…take Jack Reed, I think Jack, if he wanted to, would, could probably have been an officer, but I don’t think he wanted to be. There are some, some don’t, some do, see. Some want to lead, some don’t want to lead, they want to follow. They want you to tell them what you want done and they’ll do it, see.

Kelly: What kind of background did Jack Reed come from?

Gentry: Jack Reed’s father was a contractor…in fact… Kelly: House building contractor, or… Gentry: No, I think he… Kelly: …( ) Gentry: …dealt more in roads.

Kelly: Is that right? Well to do? 46:00Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm, in fact [Chuckling] Patton down Louisiana got on me because we…when we started out, we had this cant…we had these canteen trucks and the canteen truck would…whenever we stopped and had some time, they would open up the canteen truck and fellows could line up and buy a pop, beer, and potato chips and stuff like this, you see. And they would sell it out one a time see, they were taking care of one person at a time. Well, it’d be midnight before the last guy on the line got served, see, so…I told him, I said, you know, let’s do this thing a little different way. You c…you fellows--now these were civilians that were running this canteen thing--I said, “you fellows count 47:00out the number of cans of pop you put in this tub, a tub, and write it down. You count how many cans of beer you put in the tub, you write it down, you know how much you want for that cans that’s got beer in it, how much you want for this, and…I will give you a check out of company funds. I’ll, I’ll write check out of company funds and when he opened this thing up and we was going to set that tub right out there, see. And then everybody could get whatever they wanted out of it, see. And, so we had this one, one night, and, the, we set the tubs out and there was sort of a little depression there, and the fellows all got down in there, it was kind of, kind of a little, nice little place, and it was wooded and…so we were setting down there, and of course, the, I bought, I went to Louisville before we went on maneuver and bought 48:00a guitar. I can’t even play a guitar, I can’t play any musical instrument, but I bought a guitar. Well, as I remember, I think I gave seven dollars and a half for it, something like that. But you can always find somebody that would strum on a guitar, and it didn’t make much difference whether he could carry a tune on the thing or not, he was just, just name the song and everybody would sing, see. So we were sitting down there and I was right in there with them, and we were setting there singing and, we didn’t have any, nothing else to do down there in them jung…in the jungles in Louisiana. And here comes one of the fellows down there and said, “Colonel Patton wants to you.” Okay, and I went up, he said, “what are you doing down there, setting down there, fraternizing with those enlisted men?” And I said, “well, Colonel, one of the things that I don’t believe you understand is that I used to be one of those fellows,” and I said, 49:00“they know what my rank is, they know what my authority is, I’ve never had any problem with a, with…discipline, and if you don’t mind, I’m going back down there and sing some more, and you can come and go with us.” [Laughing] get with me.

Kelly: Did he do it?

Gentry: No, uh-uh [Chuckling]. That’s relation that he, he wrote a letter to the war department, he, his appraisal, he wrote--not a letter but his appraisal--that he wrote to the war department and he read it to the battalion and he said, “when I came with this outfit, I didn’t think it had a bit of discipline, well, we come to find out that was the best disciplined u…unit I’ve ever seen in the United States Army, and the only recommendation I can have for it, is they all come from the same hometown” [Laughing] that’s the exact words, 50:00I think. And he gave it to Colonel Moore and told him to mail it. And… Kelly: And he did.

Gentry: Yeah, and he did.

Kelly: Let me ask one question between this here, while I think about it (clears throat) Jack Reed recall an incident where the Filipinos kept coming up and throwing them cakes over the fence and singing the songs and sneak in little bits of information about the Americans, the p…progress of the war (clears throat) and I, and I think he was indicating it was the last, his last day in Cabanatuan before the Rangers came, and, and somewhere…the Japanese…decided to, they were going to take some drastic action, and…beheaded a bunch of them and put their heads on the fence post.

Gentry: At Cabanatuan?

Kelly: At Cabanatuan, mm-mm.

Gentry: No I don’t, don’t think so, I don’t, don’t remember that. That might have been earlier some time, before we got back to Cabanatuan, but I don’t remember that ever happening at Cabanatuan. 51:00Now, they had some fellows that escaped…I think and, and they beheaded them and, and came back with their heads, to a wisp of hair tied up here, toting the head on a pole, but…and they did that… Kelly: That was, that was… Gentry: …they did that with Filipinos too.

Kelly: …that was toward the end?

Gentry: Yeah, but I, we weren’t quite sure they were Americans.

Kelly: Mm-mm. This was at Cabanatuan.

Gentry: Yeah. It could have been a Filipino, their just showing off, see. We don’t know that they did anybody in the camp that way, I don’t. Now you see, a few days, a few days before we were liberated, all of the sudden the Jap guards formed up and they all marched out. They marched over the hill, and as soon as they went over the hill, 52:00I for one, started help form a detail to go out and… Kelly: Yeah, we got that story.

Gentry: …get food, yeah.

Kelly: We, we got that story and you had a big feast.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: You were, you, you said, you all, you were isolated down in…some kind of special ward there, before the Rangers came?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Well let’s see. You, you were isolated because you had the… Harris: I, I wish I had brought that map with me.

Kelly: Was it, was that because you had dysentery?

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm. If we would had had leprosy, it would have been about the same thing, as far as they were concerned.

Kelly: How far were you from the rest of them? Some distance, or… Gentry: No, it was just a fence they put up across the thing. You know the c…the layout of the camp, there was a road, it went right by the camp, okay. We were right down next to that road, that’s the reason when the Rangers came in, I didn’t have very far to go to get out that gate, the corner gate. There was a gate right at the main road.

Harris: It w…it was down that area where the Rangers handed 53:00you the… Gentry: Yeah.

Harris: …the gun.

Gentry: Mm-mm. I’d say I was about fifty yards, seventy-five yards from that gate, at the time he came in there. But it was, we was, we were segregated, we weren’t, we weren’t allowed to go up into the other of part of the camp and most of the time, the guard, the Japanese come down to see how many men you got, and they wouldn’t come in there to count us, and they counted everybody else.

Kelly: Those, those, those heads you saw, was this before the Rangers came?

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm.

Kelly: And you think it was escapees.

Gentry: Well, yeah, could be, could be escapees, it could be… Kelly: Civilians.

Gentry: …it could have been f…Filipinos, as far as we know.

Kelly: How many heads are we talking about? 54:00Gentry: Oh, I don’t know, two or three.

Kelly: And they stayed on the post for a while?

Gentry: Well, they weren’t parading up to there, so everybody would see it now what, what they did with them after that, I don’t know.

Kelly: Yeah, you did see a few heads.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Yeah, okay.

Harris: In your experience, did they, did the Japs, Japanese ever…execute…all of the, the ten-men suicide squads if any of them escaped?

Gentry: Well, I, I’ve heard, head s…heard it said that they did. They were going to do that to us on Mindanao, except we were going out to be a hundred men executed, which we weren’t about to let happen. We, we would have taken the camp over, we would, we would have taken the Japanese. We had enough people, we could take the Japanese anytime, with rakes, shovels, and hoes.

Harris: How many Japanese 55:00guards were there?

Gentry: Oh, they probably had…maybe a hundred, a hundred and twenty-five.

Harris: There were a couple of thousand POWs.

Gentry: There were two thousand of us.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: See. And most of the time the Japanese didn’t carry any…they didn’t have any ammunition in the rifle, see. Whether they were short on ammunition or what, I don’t know, but…it was like this one lieutenant Colonel, he got fed up and he got…those little railroad cars we had, they just had a big link, big, great big heavy link that you’d drop a pin through on the end of the car, you dropped the pin through this thing and a pin on the other car, and, that and, that was all the coupling you had between the cars, this great big link, and it had a big whole pin about an inch in diameter, that was a brown knob of piece on the top of it, see, so it wouldn’t go all the way through, and 56:00this colonel took this pin and hit this Japanese over the head with it. He didn’t hit hard enough to cause, he didn’t kill the Jap, but…then he took the Japanese rifle and of course the other Japanese came at him and he took the rifle and pulled the trigger and there wasn’t any, wasn’t, it wasn’t loaded, see. And they, they marched him off down the railroad track and…we heard shots, and that’s the last we ever saw of him.

Harris: In prison camp…most of your life was revolved around work, working in the fields.

Gentry: Right, mm-mm.

Harris: And there was from time to time episodes of brutality.

Gentry: Right.

Harris: Were, I supposed you could only really speak for yourself, but do you supposed 57:00that your upbringing of being exposed to a work environment--hard work environment…made it a little easier to accom…acclimate yourself to hard work at in Davao?

Gentry: Well, yeah, I, I think so. In fact, I’ve looked at this over the years and I, I haven’t come to any different conclusion that the reason that, like we had a, a greater percentage, where we’re talking per…just percentage now. We had a greater percentage of men to return…then other…companies. It’s a fact that they all grew up in a farm environment that, you know, they had to, they drove a tractor, or, or plow the fields, or…I’ll 58:00tell you another thing you do on the farms, you know. Of course like Arch Rue Arch, of course he worked in a drugstore and Skip Rue he sold insurance. Colonel Moore was a lawyer. Of course, Colonel Moore didn’t go overseas with us, Colonel (Wickard?) was…he was a, a utility inspector in, in Chicago and trainer for training the people who’re going to work on the…electric lines. That was his, his job. And a lot of, a lot of the fellows worked in garages and were good mechanics and you take…Marsh Collier, he, he…after the war he learned to be a, a cabinet maker and 59:00apparently, as far as I know became very good. I had him employed to ta…tried and started teaching him cabinet making when he was…under the GI Bill. I had ten, I had ten fellows that, that I had under the GI Bill teaching them to be cabinetmakers there for a cou…I was just a couple of years.

Harris: Yeah. It seems like so, so much of existence at Davao was devoted to tending the rice fields, and that a man would need some kind of background in labor like that to get him going, to keep him going day after day. Does that sound reasonable to you, or… Gentry: Well of course, by the time we got to Davao we had, we had lost, we had lost the, the so-called wheat, you know, I, I, that was…that’s 60:00the way it was there. See, at Davao, we only, we only had about fourteen die the whole time we were do…there, and they was, they were at death’s door when we got there. Of course, working at rice fields…we had five, six hundred who went out to the rice field every day, see, so they’d have to, not at fifteen hundred, or fourteen to fifteen hundred in the camp to, to…logging and repair fences for the, take care of chickens, take care of hogs, run the rice field, right plant to sweet potatoes, and, which (was thinking?) made tapioca out of, but… Harris: Considering what you all were being, being fed, that was pretty brutal, kind of, kind, a brutal kind of life 61:00to be doing.

Gentry: Well, one of the things--of course we were, one of us went from Cabanatuan down there, six hundred of us, we were in pretty hard shape. In fact one… [Interruption] Kelly: Transcript.

Harris: That’s it.

Gentry: Some, somebody left here, or what. (paper shuffling sounds). It all came to be the same [Chuckling].

Kelly: Good, do this one, because this one got food on.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: This one got ( ). 62:00Do you need to take a break, go to the restroom or anything?

Gentry: No.

Harris: Okay, you were saying about the group that was sent from Cabanatuan to Davao.

Gentry: Yeah, well, when we, we were in pretty sorry shape when we got there, in fact the ones that were captured in the southern islands, see, where, made up the other…part of that two-thousand. They were surprised to see our condition. They weren’t that bad off. After we arrived there, there was a…Japanese Second lieutan…tenant by the name of Yuki, and he spoke per…perfect English. In fact, I think that’s what he taught in the Japanese school, 63:00and…he thought that when the war was over, that he was going to be in the United States, and he was going be an American, and…though he was, he was easy to, to convince, and we, through, through him, we convinced the Japanese major to put the guards down on the roads some, that road is about twenty-five, thirty miles long down through the jungle, to put his guards out there, and we would run the farm. And, so then, what we had was, we just had one strand of barbwire. Most places you could step over it, we had one strand of barbwire around the camp. Outside that barbwire were coconut trees, acres upon acres of them, all kinds of--see this was in a, domain experimental farm for the Philippines Department of Agriculture, and not--they had every variety of coconuts imaginable to man, I guess. You just stepped over that fence, and there were oranges, and tangerines, and…lemons and limes and whatnot. 64:00We put a…we got us a…erected us, erected a board, and we put the different details, the coffee detail, they went out and picked the coffee beans, and culled them and, and…and prepared them, the coffee beans. We had a detail at the chicken farm, we had a detail at the pig farm, we had a detail at, what we call the cattle farm, the cattle of course were water buffalo and Brahman cattle. No cat…not, not any Herefords or anything like that, see. And we, we had a, our, our group and that took care of the machine shop, repaired the machines. We had a group that ran the sawmill. We had a group that cut, cut the trees. We had a group that repaired railroad tracks, narrow gauge railway. 65:00So we had that board with all these details on it, and you could come and go, any hour, day or night. All you had to do was walk up there and, and take a piece of chalk and write up there, we’d say coffee detail…write up there, five men, and what time you went out. You’d just write on the board and go. No guard, or anything else. And if you wanted an avocado, you’ve got an avocado. Pineapples, now we weren’t allowed to, we weren’t supposed to take any of the eggs from the chickens, or, or eat any of the hogs, unless they gave a sanction to. But…we would get the coconuts and make our own cooking oil, that cooks, they would…we’d ground up the, the rice and made flour out of it. 66:00We had a mill there. And we, they would have cakes and pies and all kinds of stuff. We used to have, we just had all foods you wanted.

Harris: Pretty self-sufficient operation.

Gentry: Yeah, and we even down had a, a place to…two or three fellows had de…repaired shoes. Another two or three that repaired clothing, what, you know, anything that they could repair, see. So, we were, we were setting out to be really a self sufficient little…group.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: See.

Harris: Almost.

Gentry: Sure we had fellows that went to rice field and a lot of times they would volunteer. They would rather go to the rice field, they wanted to go out there and plant sweet potatoes. They would rather plant rice and sweet potatoes, or whatnot, and this went on, this went on until ten men decided 67:00to escape, and when the ten men escaped, then that’s when we went back to where we we…square one, where we were limited on the amount of food we got and everything else.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: They wouldn’t let us pickup a coconut and they wouldn’t, wouldn’t, you couldn’t…get an avocado or a sweet potato, unless you…hid it under your clothing or, or sneaked it in the camp someway.

Harris: Why did the Japanese…allow the, the POWs to basically run the, the, the camp in, in the first place?

Gentry: Well, it’s just, just a convincing job that we did on them.

Harris: Oh.

Gentry: We just told them, you know, that just, this would be an ideal situation, see. And it was until the ten men escaped. Everything was just a-humming along just fine. 68:00Harris: That was Dyess’s group wasn’t it?

Gentry: Yeah, Yeah. Ed Dyess slept on one side of me, and…Sam Grashio slept on the other side, and I was, I was in their blood group--brother group to be executed.

Harris: What happened to the blood brothers after they were, after those guys escaped?

Gentry: Well, they gathered up, they gathered up a hundred men, ninety-nine to be exact, and they didn’t take me, and they put, put them over in a separate building, and they weren’t allowed, they weren’t allowed to, they were…weren’t allowed out of the building. Now they were going to, they said they were going to execute these men, and Colonel (Olson?), who was our camp commander, he said, “I don’t, you, I’m not going to sanction that until I hear official 69:00word from Tokyo,” see. So, they went through this route of going to Tokyo about it, and they came back and said, no, they would have to…meditate for one month about the crimes they committed against the Japanese government.

Harris: Oh.

Gentry: And so they took these, these fellows had to sit in that building for another…thirty days, sixty days, I forgot what, how many days was. And the building was such that the Japanese couldn’t see in, so they sat in there and they played games, talked, [Chuckling] and just didn’t do anything, see. And, of course, when the Japanese guards came in the building, whatever they were doing they hid, and, and put their head in their hand and meditated [Chuckles – Harris and Gentry], as long as he was there.

Harris: That, that might be one of those 70:00anecdotes of your, in your old speech about playing tricks on the Japanese.

Gentry: Yeah [Chuckling] well, that was, yeah it, but Lieutenant Yuki, we, one of the things we had to do with him, we ha…we detailed three men, four, we detailed four men, and they were teaching him etiquette, how to play bridge [Chuckling] he wanted to be, he wanted to be ready when he got to the United States, that he would just fit right in with everybody [Chuckling] and, and these fellows, they, they played bridge, they sat the table, put the knives and fork, and everything in the right place, and told him why, and all this business, you know, [Chuckling] and, and that kept, that ( ) kept four guys busy.

Harris: Well, one way to get just through the day [Chuckles – Harris and Gentry]. 71:00See, when you were there I know you made fake p…pills… Gentry: That was back at Cabanatuan where they made those pills.

Harris: Yeah, that’s what I mean. We you, were you able to use the pills to get more… Gentry: Food.

Harris: …food… Gentry: Uh-uh.

Harris: …more privileges, more… Gentry: Just food.

Harris: Just food.

Gentry: Just food, yeah. We’d, we traded food. Now, this whole idea came from a, a marine by the name of Rainwater from…out in Oklahoma, I think, Oklahoma or out in that neck of the woods someplace, I think he is, I think Rainwater was from Oklahoma. But he came to me and he said, tell me what he had in mind. He said, “well if we had, if we had some dummy pills, we could trade them to these Japanese, for milk and whatnot, and so I told 72:00him that, that…I would try and see what we can do, and I told him that if whatever we traded for. Now see, I was in the, navy dysentery ward and I--we didn’t go out to work. We, we, we had to stay right in there, and I told him, I said, “anything that we get out of it, if we, if we’re successful, anything we get out of it has to go to kitchen,” and we only have one can of milk. It gets dumped in there and everybody gets…if you got, you got six hundred people, everybody gets one six-hundredth of that can of milk, see, that’s where it’s going to go. And he agreed to that that, that was exactly what we’d do. Now he had a select group of people that knew how to do this trade, it’s an art, it was an art and he, he knew who they were, and when we, when we got the pills ready, why, 73:00he would issue out full… [Interruption] Gentry: …and they were supposed to bring in something back for those four pills. Now the Japanese would not confiscate the pills, because if they did, they, they were afraid that their…their source would dry up, see, that that would be the end of it, so they allowed it to go on and the fellows would trade for milk or corn beef, or something else, you see, whatever they could trade for, and… Harris: Could you explain how the trading worked?

Gentry: Oh yeah! We, well see most of us at that time were wearing Japanese underwear which was a strip of cloth and the, and they had a string they tied around your waist and you pulled the thing up between your legs and, and pulled it up underneath of that cord around your waist and flipped it over. Well, in order to c…the Filipinos would give us 74:00tobacco, they would go through the process and give the Japanese money, but the Filipinos wanted us to have that and the Japanese were willing to let us have all the tobacco we wanted, okay. So, in order to have tobacco with you, out on work detail, if the Japanese allowed you to sit down or anything, or rest or anything, you could roll yourself a cigarette. Now we used any kind of paper, just like paper like this, any kind of piece of paper we could find, ( ) that we would, would do it, use it for a cigarette paper. But we are sew a little (pocket?)…on this thing to put your tobacco in, you see and your little pieces of paper. Now the fellows that did the trade made out a pocket on the backside of this flap, and sew one, had one sewn on the back. The Japanese had little cigarette match boxes that were, oh, 75:00a couple of inches long, and about a three-inch of an inch thick, and oh, they were like a, well an inch of, a little over an inch wide, a nice little box, and when they get through with it they’d throw them down, and we, we’d collect those and one of the things we did with them, made bridge cards, made out playing cards out of them, see. Draw the, draw the clubs and the spades, and everything on the card, see, and on the backs, the backs of them would have a picture on them, see. And the same way with their cigarette packs, the cigarette packs. But anyway they t…when they went out to work, with the pills, they would have four pills in that little box and the Jap would come up alongside and…the pill had the letter w on one side. It was made by the Winthrop Company, 76:00Sulfasol, and that’s what I had to copy. It had to have a w on it and it had to have a division mark just exactly right. It had to dissolve in water in three seconds, see. And it had to weigh exactly the right amount, it had to have the right weight because these Japanese would weigh the things and they had these optical loupes that they put on and, and oh, yeah, they had these optical loupes that they would put on their eye, and they’d looked at the pill very thoroughly, see with that thing. They’d look it over. But they, the Jap would walk up alongside the fellow out working and he’d say “W” Kah--Kah in Japanese makes a question out of whatever you say. Kaho on the end of it is, makes the question. He’d say, “W Kah.” And the guy Horn, he would just keep right on. Horn he’d say, 77:00“yeah,” and the Jap would say, “how much e, how much e?” He’d say, “four milks.” “Uh! No-no-no-no-no!” see, and this haggling would go on all day, see. This Japanese soldier and that guy, Horn, out there, this haggling would go on all, practically all day, and toward, sometimes later in the afternoon, a trade would be made, a can of corned beef, or a can of milk, or a can of something would be traded, and it would go up underneath a jacket or a shirt, or anything they had, see. When they came back through the gate they’d have shake down, and these Japs would go around and pat these guys knowingly, and you know, when you pat a guy, if he had a can of milk and a, a can of beef--corned beef, or something, you’re cound to feel it, see, they couldn’t feel a thing [Chuckles – Harris], not a thing, couldn’t feel it at all. 78:00And so this t…they, they’d get through the gate with it, and Rainwater would make them go to the kitchen and, and we’d turn it all over to the kitchen, whatever, whatever it was, see.

Harris: Was that where it ended, the… Gentry: Yeah, of course it all ended when we were liberated, see.

Harris: No, I mean…the--when the food was not traded for something else, say a, a watch, or, a weigh in…there is, it was… Gentry: Oh by this time, this time, this time all our watches and the rings and everything had already been traded off.

Harris: Yeah, I was just… Gentry: Yeah.

Harris: Yeah, I was just thinking that…that’s something a, a, a guard might really want, and who knows what you could get an exchange for, for a good watch.

Gentry: Yeah.

Harris: So.

Gentry: Yeah, that’s, they had already been traded off. Of course, I, back to when the watches and the rings were around 79:00the guard, if the guard saw it, he’d just take it, he wouldn’t ask you, he wouldn’t ask you to trade, he’d just take it.

Kelly: Wasn’t too many left anyway, was there?

Gentry: No.

Kelly: They took a lot of them early on, didn’t they.

Gentry: See I, I, with my, with my group, we had a, a company safe, and I don’t know what they have for companies’ safes now, but we had a strong box about this long and about that high, well I would say it’s, oh two feet long, a foot high, or a little more, and it was made out of, made out of steel, it took two peaceful--people to carry the dog gone thing, and…we had a key as custodian of the company funds had a key, because at Fort Knox, when we started out, you see, I got an allowance, sixty cents per man, and for that sixty cents, 80:00I had to buy food, had to pay for the food ( ) we fed the men for sixty cents a day, three meals, and we bought the food from the commissary, we bought food from trucks that came around with fresh vegetables, food, trucks that came around with milk. Now we bought it right from these people, see. I think that the price was established at the post level, but, you know, we bought it right off the truck and I wrote out the checks for all the stuff every month, you see. But we had that box and everybody chucked off their rings or watches, fountain pens, and anything like that, and went in that box. I know my watch went in there, the fountain pen I had that was a good Parker pen, and it went in the box 81:00along with everybody was lined up, we put it all in the by--in that box and we had some cosmoline and we filled, we covered that thing with cosmoline and wrapped it up in shelter half, and more cosmoline and more shelter halves, and we buried that thing, see. And that thing is probably still over there some place, see. In fact I asked if they let me go into the town and see if I couldn’t find it. They had moved (Thiamana?). Earl Collins had a movie camera and he took, he took some movie film of the first part of the campaign. So, so we did, in my group, we didn’t have any, we didn’t have any jewelry from them to take. All we had on was our dog tags.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: I had that flipped up in my face a good number of times and one Japanese cut it off and threw it away, 82:00 see.

Harris: Did you… Kelly: You lost it for good?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Didn’t it make you feel kind of naked when you didn’t have your dog tag?

Gentry: Oh yeah.

Kelly: Did that frighten you a little?

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Because you might be derelict without anybody knowing who you were and that kind of thing?

Gentry: Yeah, really, when we were liberated from prison camp…they wanted to know, you know, they asked you what your rank was and you told them, you could have told them that you were a general!

Kelly: You really can’t.

Gentry: As far as the United States Army was concerned, they wouldn’t have known the difference [Chuckling], I don’t think.

Kelly: Not for a while, anyway.

Gentry: Well, in fact some of them did jump themselves up two or three [Chuckles – Harris], two or three grades, you see… Kelly: Did they really?

Gentry: Yeah! I know that to be a fact [Chuckling].

Kelly: Is that right?

Gentry: Yeah [Chuckling] most of them… Kelly: Not ( ) mature.

Gentry: …most of them were enlisted men, they went to… Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: …they went to master sergeant right off the bat [Laughing].

Kelly: Yeah.

Harris: When you were a POW, did, did you build a radio?

Gentry: Oh I was, I helped, 83:00I helped in, in this matter. On Mindanao, I was in charge of, of all the farming operations, having grown up on a farm, and…the Japanese and I had a round at Cabanatuan, over my interrogation. In my interr…interrogation I said I was a farmer, and that’s what was written down, was farmer. Later they came back wanted to know what kind of farmer, and…you know, central Kentucky we always referred to it as general farming, because we raised…horses and, and cows, and sheep, cattle and sheep, and…tobacco and all the other stuff and we all, always referred to it as a general, general farming. So, they wanted to know what kind of farming, I did, and I, in parentheses, 84:00I wrote after the farming, I put general. Well they wanted to know, they took me over at headquarters and I was standing there with a mess of Japanese with fixed bayonets and they wanted to know how many men I commanded, how much territory I commanded, see, and on-and-on, and finally I got through this interpreter that, that, to let me have a sheet of paper. And so I started writing. I wrote down ev…everything that I had ever heard of they were growing, and rice was one of them. I never grew any rice [Chuckling] but I put it on that piece of paper. So when we got to Mindanao, I come to find out that I was to be the farm expert and I [Chuckling] didn’t know a thing in the world about it. Now there 85:00was a, we, when we arrived at, at Davao Penal colony, there was a Filipino engineer and he graduated from Colorado School of Mines, came to this country and got his degree, and he was there and the school teacher was still there, and another Filipino, and I think he was maybe the head of the whole thing, I’m not, not quite sure about that. But anyway, (Cabera?) was to--that was his name, and he was…to be my bodyguard, and from him I real quickly got a lot of information about all the stuff going on over there, as far as crops were concerned, and this schoolteacher managed to go out and get me some books on agriculture, Filipino agriculture, 86:00and we had a fellow by the name of Jim (Tuttle?), he came from down here, around Bowling Green, and he was a Ag major and he went to…Western…to school, and so he and I poured over those, poured over those Ag books thoroughly. In fact he and I had lots conversations about, about…raising that stuff and what you do with it. But anyway, that was…I had that to help me, and…I went from, see I went around from detail to detail by myself. I’d have, sometimes I’d have one guard trailing along with me, sometimes two, and sometimes, ( ) you know, if there was something new coming up, like pollinating the pumpkins, 87:00I would take the detail out and show them how to do it, see, and I would…probably take that detail for the whole day, see I’d have them for the whole day and next day I’d probably be by myself, going from one group to the other, see how everything was going. I had…thousand of times to escape, and I could have escaped, then it just, most anybody, but, you know, if I escaped, then what do you, what are you going to do about the punishment to the rest of them got, you know. Every time somebody escaped we got our rations cut a little bit more.

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: And I wanted, I didn’t want to cut them anymore, I, I wasn’t about to go off and leave. In fact, Sam Grashio and, and Ed Dyess, they talked to me for a long time before they left. I knew, 88:00I knew the moment they left, because one of them slept on this side, and one slept on this side. I knew what time was, what time of night they got up, and went over, and they were on the (clears throat) they were on this detail and, and they went over and signed out, signed out on this board, like I was telling you, and they had, they had some Filipinos that were criminals, still in the camp, a few, about a dozen, maybe. They had a couple of these Filipinos, the Filipinos had to, had to haul the supplies that they had gathered together, to take, and had the, water buffalos with saddle bags, I guess on, someway they had the water buffalo was all, see. And they took off, see, way in the middle of night, and I covered for them until ten o’clock at night, 89:00and, and we had to tell the Japanese that we had ten men missing, and I knew exactly when they left, right to the minute. Now, he wanted me to go and I told him I was, I can’t, I can’t even, I can’t even consider that for those people over there in the hospital, the hospital there. I’m not going to walk off and leave them; they can’t go into the jungle. I said no, we can all going in the jungle, except those people over there and are you going to sacrifice those people? Not me, I’m not going to do it. But they, they went. In fact, when I got off the boat in San Francisco, Sam Grashio was standing at end of the gangplank. He didn’t know whether I was dead or alive. And he was, he was standing waiting to see who was coming down that gangplank, and he started apologizing, 90:00and I said, “no, don’t apologize,” you know, that, that’s supposed to be a thing that every soldier is supposed to do is, is to escape if he can, and I said, “you did what you felt you had to do, and I did what I felt I had to do.” Kelly: Was he a tanker?

Gentry: No-no, uh-uh, Sam was in the Air Force ( ). Ted Dyess of course was in the Air Force. Dyess was a, Dyess was a…captain and, and Grashio was a first lieutenant at that time.

Harris: You said you helped build a radio.

Gentry: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry.

Harris: You’re… Gentry: The very, the very fact that I had, that I could go anyplace in the camp… Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: …one of the things I had was a, a key to the big warehouse, a big warehouse there. It just had all kinds of things. 91:00I, it, you know, if you needed five hundred hose, there were five hundred hose in there, if you needed a five hundred rakes, we had five hundred rakes, you see. It was huge building, and it had all kinds of stuff in it, and they’d say well we need a piece of…we need some copper wire. Well, sometimes during the day I’d find some copper wire. They’d say we need some glass, and I’d find some glass. They’d say we need some copper screen, and I’d keep searching until I found some copper screen.

Kelly: That was a, that was a pretty good tour for you wasn’t it that as far as being, as far as prisoners of war.

Gentry: Yes. The Davao was good for us, yeah, in a, in a way.

Kelly: How long did that last?

Gentry: Eighteen months. See we, of course they, they took about five hundred out and took them down to Davao City in that neighborhood, 92:00to build an air field. And that’s the ones, they, they were on a ship that was thought I was, was…torpedoed and out of the five hundred though, I think there were about eighty something that got off of that one.

Kelly: Torpedoed in route to where?

Gentry: Huh, well, I’m not quite right sure where it was in route to, but, it was torpedoed at Sand, around Zamboanga somewhere down there on that southern part of Mindanao.

Kelly: Early on?

Gentry: Yeah, ( )… Kelly: Is inter-island move? It wasn’t a move to Japan.

Gentry: It was…see they loaded us up and headed us back to Cabanatuan about the same time they loaded them up and started them. I guess they would have come back to Cabanatuan too.

Kelly: Why were they moving you to Cabanatuan, do you know? Because some Americans moving up there?

Gentry: Yeah, because Americans moving up.

Kelly: When did they move you?

Gentry: Oh, it was… Kelly: Forty-four? Mid-forty-four?

Gentry: Mid, no. 93:00Yeah, about mid-forty-four, yeah.

Kelly: They were moving you because the Americans were moving… Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: …in that direction. And then you went in to Cabanatuan.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: And that was a big change.

Gentry: Yeah, yeah, it was, yeah. Now, see, one of the… Kelly: Did you all get any feedback about the…hell ships? Do you know anything about those? That they were bad deal?

Gentry: All I know is just what I’ve heard from people that were on them.

Kelly: I mean now since you got back.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: But nothing that while you were in camp.

Gentry: No-no, we didn’t know anything about that.

Kelly: You knew it was dangerous though, because of the state of nature of the war at that time, didn’t you?

Gentry: Well, I would, yeah I would think everybody would think that, but when they went out of there, they didn’t know they were going to Japan, they didn’t know where they were going, see. At that time, we didn’t have, we didn’t have a too good idea just, just how far along the war had progressed. 94:00Harris: When you went out on just the detail hundred time, you never knew whether it was going to turn out good or bad.

Gentry: That’s right, you never knew when you went out that gate whether you were going to be alive the next minute or not, to tell you the truth.

Kelly: On the…(clears throat) on the Oryoku which was the worse hell ship ride of all, which was the one that (clears throat) three of those men from Harrodsburg left on and, and didn’t make it, and Goodpaster being one of them, Den (Hardsdell?) being another one, and… Gentry & Kelly: Arch Rue.

Kelly: …being the third one (clears throat) have you…since talked to anyone that was on that ship, on that ride?

Gentry: The only one I talked to is (Gromer Bruwley—Brumet?) Kelly: He wasn’t on that ride.

Gentry: Well, he was, he was on one, it was…bombed off of Lingayen Gulf.

Kelly: Yeah, but… Gentry: And… Kelly: …that was different.

Gentry: Yeah. Was that a different ship?

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Well now you see, I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t know which ship was what, as far 95:00as that goes.

Harris: There were several, several of them.

Kelly: I, I was just, what I was wondering, if you, if you had by chance had a friend that got on it that survived that you’ve since talked to, that had left from Cabanatuan when you were there. Of course you had Arch Rue he got on it, didn’t get, didn’t survive, but… Gentry: Well I guess I have talked to somebody that was on it, but I don’t remember exactly who.

Harris: Before we get into the hell ship rides, when you were, either at Davao, or at Cabanatuan, or O’Donnell for that matter…did you have to take a lot of precautions to protect yourself from the other POWs, protect what few things you had from being stolen, or… Gentry: No, uh-uh, no.

Harris: There were no stealing, after… Gentry: At first, at first yeah, 96:00that, oh we say the first…the first six months, maybe, yeah. But after that, no.

Harris: They were very little, little or no stealing after that.

Gentry: Oh no, uh-uh.

Harris: Nothing left to steal.

Gentry: No. Yeah, there wasn’t much [Chuckling] to steal, who, who would want it? No, I think that, and of course people shared…like the fellows that were captured in the southern islands, they came in with their s…with their canvas cots, mosquito bars, and you know, they, they set up in high style. The dentist came in with all his tools, see, he, he had all, he could drill, he could drill a hole in your teeth, to a tooth just as nice as you please. He didn’t have anything to put in it after he drilled the hole! He didn’t have enough to fill the hole up with, but, if you wanted a teeth--tooth pulled out, he had the, he had the pliers there to do the job, see, and he sat up a dental office, 97:00and he, in the plant, and see he was one of the fellows that built the radio.

Harris: Oh.

Gentry: See, he had all his tools out, all his, all his pliers and pricks and little things, you know, that he goes around the teeth with and whatnot, see, and… Harris: Was this a, a, an open secret that a radio was being built?

Gentry: No, no-no.

Harris: It was very much a secret.

Gentry: Yeah, very much so.

Harris: Oh.

Gentry: And a, and a…Ted (Brightling?) was a West Pointer, he was a captain, a West Pointer, and Ted was a Ham radio operator. Major Perkins who was a, a dentist brought his toys too with him. He was a ham radio operator. Major Ruth, an MD, was a ham radio operator, and…Marion Taylor 98:00from Louisville, down here, was a reserve officer in the Navy and he worked for Philco, one of them, and he was a vacuum tube expert.

Kelly: What was his name?

Gentry: Marion Taylor.

Kelly: Did he survive?

Gentry: I don’t know. I, I may have heard from him.

Harris: Where did they get a vacuum tube?

Gentry: They made it.

Harris: Really!

Gentry: Mm-mm.

Harris: How?

Gentry: Well, but that, like I told you, they said, “we want a piece of glass,” and I gave them a piece of glass. Now how they got the thing made, I don’t know, but they did, and… Kelly: This is while you… Gentry: …it was one frequency.

Kelly: …this is while you were in Mindanao?

Gentry: Yeah, uh-huh, one frequency. And Major Perkins took a canteen and he very carefully cut the bottom of that canteen up and he took that piece that he cut out from the bottom and that’s what they built the radio with, and they put it back up in there, and up at the top, 99:00up at the top, they…he made a nice little brass hook to get down in there, and they’d always put some water in that. When they got ready to use it, they took the little brass cup out, and there was a place there to put the, the two electric wires in, they replaced it, by putting the ear, of the earphones, and the earphones were made with Ruth’s stethoscope. He walked around through the camp and he never went out on a work detail, he stayed in the camp, in the hospital there all the time. You never saw Major Ruth without that stethoscope hanging around his neck, he always had that stethoscope around his neck, and we’d have a--sometimes they would line us up for physical check, and Major Ruth was always taking that stethoscope and listening to your heart. He couldn’t have heard your heartbeat for nothing [Laughing] Now, they made all this stuff.

Harris: Yeah.

Kelly: When was this? Went for… Harris: Huh?

Kelly: …early on 100:00in, in your tour there, or late?

Gentry: Huh, it started fairly early.

Kelly: When did you ( ) it?

Gentry: And I, I got drawn into it, now these fellows, these fellows are, of course I was a ham radio operator, I got a ham license ( ) they got their heads toge…together and they knew that, they knew that I had access to, to… Kelly: Materials.

Gentry: …materials there see. So, they…they, they brought me into it. Now I, I knew what we were doing, I knew that what we were, attempting to do. I didn’t want to know where it was, the Japanese got me cornered some place and wanted to know about the radio, I couldn’t tell them. Because if I didn’t know where it was, I couldn’t tell them about it, see. And it was long, oh a long time, and just before we left Mindanao, in the first place we had a, a little table built outside of the 101:00dental office, and we’d sit there and eat at night, the rice or whatever else we might have stolen, and…when it got dark, they’d go in there and at, and they would put everything in and…they would listen to KGEI out of San Francisco. Now Major Ruth would go in and Perkins would go in, and the rest of us would set out there at the table, and they’d come back and they say, well this is what, this is what was on the news tonight. And so they’d tell us what it was. Now after…after that, we split up and go around through the camp and say, “hey, have you heard the latest rumor?” “No, what?” and we’d tell them, see. A lot of time somebody would come back and say “who told you that?” “Oh, somebody up in Barrack Six.” 102:00Harris: It was disguised as a r…as a rumor.

Gentry: Yeah, right.

Harris: Oh.

Gentry: Yeah, right, and… Kelly: Can you, can you re…remember some important bit of information that you got? At least that you considered it important?

Gentry: Well we knew about, of course we knew about the, the fall of, Rommell’s defeat in North Africa, we knew about the invasion of Italy, we knew about, we knew, we would, I’m not sure we knew about D-Day or not, but anyway, we were pretty well up to date on the thing and… Harris: Did the Japanese… Gentry: …( ) I don’t remember of course.

Harris: …the Japanese… Gentry: I tried to remember them, see.

Harris: …the Japanese never heard of any of these so-called rumors?

Gentry: Oh, there came in the camp numerous times looking for the radio and everything. They saw a piece, something that, in the dirt that looked like it had been dug up, they’d dig 103:00it up, they’d go through everything you had, they’d go through it, throw in everything in one direction and the other, see.

Harris: Oh… Gentry: Oh, they, they came in. We had a, we had a, on Mindanao we had a boy by the name of…well, well, what his name escapes me but he, we gave him the name of, of Porky, he stayed fat all the time, because the Japanese were feeding him on the side, and…we figured that he was the guy that where he was, where the Japanese get a lot of information, and every so often, we’d have to do something about it, and we had a little fellow in the camp was, was the smallest guy there, and we’d tell, we would tell him to go and get Porky and take him out there between the buildings, see. Now the fellows would all get around in a circle so the Japanese couldn’t see what was going on, see, 104:00and they’d get him between the buildings which ( ), helped hide it, see. And little (Newman?) would get, get Porky out there, and he’d give him a good beating, and we wouldn’t have any trouble for awhile, but Porky would go back to his old habits [Chuckling].

Kelly: Got hungry.

Gentry: Hunger does lots of things. But… Kelly: Did they ever, did they ever discover your radio?

Gentry: No, in fact I discovered it w…when every once in a while I’d, you know, somebody would pick up all the canteens and head over to the water faucet, see, and fill the canteens. And I was getting ready, picking up the canteens and I said, “you know, every time I try to get water out of that canteen, there is none in it, and I go where I can’t put any in it.” [Chuckling] and one of them laughed and said, “Bill, that’s the radio.” [Laughing] Then I got, the guy got to exa…I examined it, and I did know about it then, but see, they made this thing 105:00and one of the things they did was take an old saw or something and pull up over your canteen when you filled it let the water run over and wet the sock, and the evaporation of the wa…water out of the sock would keep your water cool. So we had a sock on it, just like all the other canteens, you know, in the camp.

Harris: It was pretty, pretty ingenious.

Gentry: Yeah we had it, in high, they say that they had a radio in Cabanatuan, I don’t…I didn’t know anything about that one. I, I just heard say.

Kelly: I never heard about it.

Gentry: Well… Kelly: But then… Gentry: …I’ve heard… Kelly: …in any of my interviews, but that doesn’t mean… Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: …it isn’t so.

Gentry: I’ve heard, I’ve heard some of the fellows talking that they had a radio at Cabanatuan, I… Kelly: When wa…when wa…when were the Filipinos singing songs and telling you about, and, and putting news in, dispersed in the songs? Do you remember that?

Gentry: Oh.

Kelly: When they’d come up to the fence and sing, I love you and 106:00then, they invaded Guadalcanal, or something.

Gentry: No, I don’t remember that. That was at Cabanatuan?

Kelly: Well, it was…yeah, it was at Cabanatuan and, and Reed had it that, at the end, the last time they were there, you had them singing and, and…throwing in some… Gentry: Well they threw, they threw notes over the fence. See now we had a, we had what we call perimeter guard inside and…at Cabanatuan and they walked around the inside.

Kelly: Were you on, were you at Cabanatuan just one time or two times?

Gentry: Two times, I was at Cabanatuan and went to… Kelly: Was this the first time… Gentry: …Mindanao, and then… Kelly: …or the second time that you were there?

Gentry: …second time, that’s where we… Kelly: Last time.

Gentry: …second I was liberated, see, but they were throwing, they were throwing notes over the fence, and they were, they were taking notes out and giving them to Colonel Duckworth, and Duckworth wouldn’t divulge what was in them.

Kelly: Was he the…senior 107:00officer, Duckworth?

Gentry: Yeah he was senior officer ( )… Kelly: Full Colonel?

Gentry: Yeah, he was full colonel, in medical. He was the only full colonel that stayed behind.

Kelly: Did you all have a pretty good…hierarchy and where the prisoners respected those orders and function as such?

Gentry: Well, y… Kelly: You could always recognize him as the CO and he… Gentry: …well I, I never… Kelly: …he, he got the… Gentry: I… Kelly: …he got the… Gentry: I never did… Kelly: …promotion.

Gentry: …know too much what the hierarchy was in Cabanatuan. I knew what it was in Mindanao because I was part of it, see.

Kelly: But you did have a…did have leadership within the prisoners…ranks.

Gentry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know… Kelly: And, and discipline to some extent.

Gentry: Yeah. Now see, as far as detail leaders, could be anybody from a private to a lieutenant colonel. Colonel McGee 108:00and Colonel McGuire usually took the ones out to the…handled the details going to the rice field. Now they were young men that were promoted to lieutenant colonels from captains right at the very first, first part of the, right at the start, outset, outset of the war, see. I think both of them were captains and they were young and…West Pointers, and they were…jacked right up real quick.

Kelly: The senior office from the 192nd was that one of the Rue’s, Skip?

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm, yeah.

Kelly: What was his rank?

Gentry: He was a captain.

Kelly: Captain.

Gentry: Uh-huh, yeah. Well see, he, he, he was a captain and he was in the c…had D Company and they transferred D Company to the 194th 109:00he wen…he was pulled in to…General Weavers’ group…and of course there he was used mostly as a liaison officer, I think that’s… Kelly: He went to Japan, didn’t he.

Gentry: Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: Did you cross his path some place in the prison systems?

Gentry: At Cabanatuan, yeah.

Kelly: First time.

Gentry: No, second time.

Kelly: Second time.

Gentry: I, I saw him before they got all those ships, yeah.

Kelly: A lot of stuff about Skip.

Gentry: I tell--yeah, I am talking about Skip.

Kelly: Skip and yo…oh, okay.

Gentry: Yeah, Skip went… Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: …he went on, he went on one of them.

Kelly: A different ship from, different ship from Arch’s.

Gentry: I assume so, because… Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: …he, he made it and many of them didn’t.

Kelly: We only have about five more minutes. You, you got some more questions you want to ask him before we… Harris: Yeah, I got a fistful of them.

Kelly: He got a fistful of them.

Harris: [Laughter – Harris] but I think that the more important ones have been answered. The…the 110:00kind of behavior that are, took place in prison camps seems to have been pretty well defined as to what was appropriate and what was inappropriate for a POW to do, as, tell, telling the Japanese what was heard ov…over the radio was obviously inappropriate and that could get you beat up. Can you think of anything else that was inappropriate and could get you beat up?

Gentry: Oh yeah, one of the, one of the rules that they had, that we had on Mindanao for a long time, was we weren’t allowed to sing. We weren’t allowed to have religious services. We had them, but we had to have them in, in secrecy, see.

Harris: You mean this was the Japanese rule.

Gentry: Yeah, right, 111:00the Japanese rule, see. And we weren’t…we…well, one of the things we were, why they would allow us to do like on…Mindanao they would allow us to gather…what we call sewer grass but it was a, a for a vine that grew in the drainage ditches. It looked like…similar to sweet potato vine, and you cut off a, or break off about six inches of the end of that vine, see, and we’d cook that up and make soup out of it, or, you know, cook it up and then…the oriental name for it is King-Kong, and…just before I left, just before I left the lake and I was reading in the paper where King-Kong has gotten a 112:00hold in the canals and ditches in (Lakoe?) nobody has been trying to figure out where it came from, see, but they, they’re finding it in the drain…that drainage ditches and whatnot there, but they would, they would let us have that. They’d let us take sweet potato vines…we could break off the end of sweet potato vines and we could cook those. Though we weren’t, weren’t allowed to take coconut, we weren’t allowed to take an orange or anything like that in season.

Kelly: It’s a matter of fact, you took one you could get in serious trouble, couldn’t you.

Gentry: Yeah, in fact, in fact we raised much cane about it, raised so much cane about it that one day I had to take a detail out and the guy gave everybody access and we chopped down all the citrus trees within three hundred yards of the camp, see. If you ever try to drop down a citrus tree with a dental axe, now that is a real problem 113:00 [Chuckling].

Harris: Yeah, I’ll bet. What I meant in part was…was there anything a POW could do that could get him be beaten up by other POWs?

Gentry: Well, like… Harris: Is there, is… Gentry: …like… Harris: …besides what Porky did.

Gentry: Yeah, right… Kelly: Were there many of those? Many Porkies?

Gentry: Huh…we only had one in Mindanao. I, I don’t know what we had in Cabanatuan.

Kelly: So it wasn’t a real common thing.

Gentry: I don’t think so, I don’t think it was, but I think, of course, as time went on, I think it got better and better, as far as that’s concerned. I, I wouldn’t think that, you know, if somebody stole something from somebody else, which wasn’t much to steal, that yeah, there might be some fisticuffs involved, before it was over… Kelly: Were there many fights? 114:00Gentry: Rare, very rare.

Kelly: Well, there were some but… Gentry: Yet, you know, with that kind of diet, one of the things that you run low on is vitamin B1, and the d…on Mindanao, the doctors…made up some stuff over in the hospital there. They made up some stuff out of rice, some way, and they said it would take the place of B1, and…I stood there at the door with a big whole syringe about that big around, about that long, and everybody that came by I gave them a shot. We didn’t have any alcohol and we didn’t disinfect any needles or anything, we just, you stepped up and you got a shot, see.

Kelly: Gee [Chuckles – Kelly] Gentry: And then when we got, we got vitamin B1…vitamin B through the Red Cross, when we got that, we did the same thing. 115:00Now here again we didn’t have any alcohol or anything like that to sterilize anything with but just step up and get your shot. Now the fellows would come in from the rice field, or, or vegetable patches with, they would be fussing and arguing with each other a little bit. You gave them a shot of vitamin B, in fifteen minutes they’re about gooood friends again.

Kelly: It made them feel good.

Gentry: Yeah, uh-huh.

Kelly: Beer has B1 too, doesn’t it.

Gentry: Yeah, mm-mm, yeah.

Kelly: That's the reason you all drank so much beer when you, after the rescue.

Gentry: Oh yeah, yeah.

Kelly: Had a real craving for it.

Gentry: Oh yeah, we got to back that truck up there loaded down with it [Chuckling].

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: And we never did drink it all up [Laughing] you could get all the beer you wanted… Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: …twenty-four hours a day [Laughing]. You just stepped up there, the man setting on the back of the truck would hand it to you, ice cold [Chuckling] ready to go. 116:00Harris: Oh.

Kelly: Well, it’s four and I think your wife is down there.

Gentry: Oh, is she?

Kelly: Yeah. You got…do you have a last question you want to ask him?

Harris: Huh… Kelly: …before we close?

Harris: Oh, twenty or thirty [Chuckling].

Gentry: Well, why, why don’t you do this. Why don’t you…just, just list all those things, mail it, mail it to me and, and I’ll see what I can do with each one of them.

Harris: There was see, we went through the hard ones already. The others are mostly factual matters, just holes in the evidence that I have, so…yeah, I’ll, I’ll write it out and send it to you.

Gentry: Send them to me, I’ll sit down and see what I can do with it.

Harris: Okay, uh-huh. The only other question I have among the, among the difficult ones to answer was…the last time we talked, you, you said that after about six weeks or so…all 117:00the (feeling?) was gone and you know, you were talking about the…some POWs playing with the, the snakes like cats…because I, they had reached a point, in part because they had reached a point where…they were just plain fatalistic, you know, at, if, if you live, you live, and if you die, you die.

Gentry: Well, a, a, a real good example is…playing with the snakes now was no more, more than Herby (Wills?).

Harris: Yeah.

Gentry: Herby went to VMI and, and he was a reserve officer called to active duty, and he was just an inquisitive person, and had more guts than anybody you ever saw, in fact, he jumped over side of the ship fifteen miles out to sea and made it in. He jumped off the ship with the ship going, 118:00and in an armada, in the middle of an armada of Japanese ships. They stopped the ships turned on the searchlights and, and all the firing and carrying on you’ve ever heard out there for a while. Finally they cranked up and we went on. Herby jumped in the ocean and he made it, he made, he swam out to sea rather than swim in, swimming toward the shore, see. The Japanese were looking for him going toward the shore, see. But he was going the other way, and he dived down and swam under water over to the next ship, and come up alongside the ship and get him some air and dived down, and, and go to the next ship. And he kept going until he got past the last ship in the group, you see.

Harris: Huh, but they was out to sea, what… Gentry: Yeah, he was, he was going out to sea.

Harris: He was going to swim to California, or what [Laughter – Harris and Gentry] Gentry: But then when they moved 119:00on and he turned around and headed toward the shore.

Harris: Oh I see.

Gentry: See? He headed toward the shore and he had, he had fixed his--he had a musette bag.

Kelly: Fixing to make it out a float?

Gentry: And…he fixed that thing so that…he smeared stuff all over it and made it pretty much waterproof and everything he had, he, he fixed it before we left…Davao, he fixed it so it was pretty much waterproof. And of course he was a good swimmer anyway. But he said he hadn’t, hadn’t been going very long until he bumped into something and come to find out it was a pumpkin floating in the water so he had some string and he tied the string around the stem on the pumpkin and tied it to his waist. Later on he bumped into something else and it was a coconut floating. So it, if it floats it’s bound to hold up a little bit, so he tied something on to that coconut. Now this is at dark, 120:00at night, see. And by morning he, he reached the shore and he said he crawled up on the shore and just collapsed and he said when he, he just passed out, he said he came to, the Filipinos had built a shade over the top of him and they were all sitting there waiting for him to wake up.

Kelly: Where did he come from? Where did he go?

Gentry: The Filipinos?

Kelly: No, he, where was he from?

Gentry: Oh he is…he was from Virginia some place… Kelly: Where was he?

Gentry: …but I, and, but he is, he… Kelly: …Infantryman?

Gentry: …is down in Texas.

Kelly: Was he infantryman or… Gentry: Huh?

Kelly: What, what, what was his job in the army?

Gentry: Oh he was in the, he was with the ca…in the cavalry.

Kelly: Was he, was… Gentry: that’s where he was supposed to be.

Kelly: What was his name?

Gentry: Herbert (Wills?) Kelly: Will.

Gentry: ( ).

Kelly: What was his rank?

Gentry: He was a first lieutenant.

Kelly: First lieutenant.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Huh! Reserve officer?

Gentry: Yeah, uh-huh.

Kelly: Uh-huh, yeah.

Gentry: And his son went to VMI with my son.

Kelly: Is that right? 121:00Gentry: Yeah. They, but they’re down there.

Kelly: Where is your son now?

Gentry: He is in Virginia.

Kelly: Whereabouts?

Gentry: Rocky Mountain, that’s about thirty miles south of ( ).

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: I mean of (Erlington?), a third of a mile south of Roanoke.

Kelly: Yeah.

Gentry: Yeah.

Kelly: Well, that’s nice of you to share this time with us and we have a lot of information about your, your…experiences in the prison, as a prisoner of war, World War II, and that the prisoner of the Japanese, and…it adds a lot of good value to posterity I think, and (clears throat) I, I think that you conducted yourself well as a soldier and, as a prisoner of war, and I’m glad that we were able to, to get this information.

Gentry: Well I’m glad, I’m glad to do it, but, I’m, and you send me that list and I, I’ll work on it, I, I’ll give you an answer. It might not be the right answer, but if it’s not, you, you write me back 122:00and I’ll, I’ll…give you another answer [Chuckling].

Harris: Okay, I’ll, I’ll get a list.

Gentry: Maybe I’ll work in and see if I can come around the right way.

Harris: Okay.

Kelly: Thank you, thank you. How do you spell Jeff’s last name? Suchanek?

“END OF INTERVIEW”