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Nothing worked in these Japanese factories because the men at the machines were still fighting the war from inside the wire. In Mukden and Yokohama, American prisoners of war were forced to measure parts, build tools, weld ship components, and work under guards, hunger, and brutal discipline—yet the output kept failing in ways the Japanese could not fully see.
This military history story follows the sabotage, survival, and quiet resistance of captured soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen sent to tool-and-die shops, shipyards, and factory camps after the fall of the Philippines. From bad blueprints and cold welds to iron filings in gearboxes and concrete poured around stolen machine parts, the prisoners used technical skill as their last weapon. The result is a gripping World War II documentary-style narration about prisoner of war camps, forced labor, and industrial sabotage in Manchuria and Japan.
Ideal for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, wartime history, prisoner of war accounts, military history narration, and long-form historical storytelling. If you search for World War II factory sabotage, American POW stories, Japanese prison camps, or historical documentary narration, this story fits that lane perfectly.
This military history story follows the sabotage, survival, and quiet resistance of captured soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen sent to tool-and-die shops, shipyards, and factory camps after the fall of the Philippines. From bad blueprints and cold welds to iron filings in gearboxes and concrete poured around stolen machine parts, the prisoners used technical skill as their last weapon. The result is a gripping World War II documentary-style narration about prisoner of war camps, forced labor, and industrial sabotage in Manchuria and Japan.
Ideal for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, wartime history, prisoner of war accounts, military history narration, and long-form historical storytelling. If you search for World War II factory sabotage, American POW stories, Japanese prison camps, or historical documentary narration, this story fits that lane perfectly.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On July 29, 1943, on the flat plain outside Mukden in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, roughly
00:08a thousand American prisoners walked four miles to a new camp. Two-story brick barracks. A fence.
00:16And right beside it, the reason they had been carried more than 2,000 miles from the Philippines
00:22by ship and train. A factory complex. Several large buildings, a rail siding, a timber yard,
00:30and inside, rows of machinery that had once come from England and from Detroit.
00:35The Japanese company that ran it was called Manshu Kosaku Kikai. The prisoners called it MKK.
00:44Ken Towery was 20, a Texan who had enlisted on his 18th birthday and spent the siege of
00:51Corregidor on a three-inch anti-aircraft gun. At MKK, he was given a job that sounds simple.
00:58Take a machine apart. Piece by piece. Measure every part so Japanese technicians could draw
01:05blueprints of it. Stop on that for a moment. Before Pearl Harbor, Washington had put machine
01:11tools under export control and then cut Japan off. The machines in that factory could not be replaced
01:18by ordering more from Detroit. So the Japanese needed to learn them, part by part. And the hands
01:25doing the learning were American. So picture that room. On one side, a Japanese drafting table.
01:32On the other, a 20-year-old from Corregidor with a machine in pieces. Between them, a column of
01:39measurements that only one of them had actually taken. Keep that picture. We will come back to it.
01:45On paper, it was a perfect arrangement. According to historian Linda Goetz Holmes,
01:53Mitsubishi, the company that built the Zero Fighter, had asked the Japanese army for skilled
01:58workers. The army delivered soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines taken in the fall of the
02:04Philippines. 1,200 in the first shipment alone. On the Japanese side of the ledger, this was not a
02:12punishment. It was an investment. And yet, in October 2012, four survivors of that camp sat
02:19together at a reunion in New Orleans. One of them, Erwin Johnson, 91 years old, summed up their work in
02:27that factory in a single sentence. We're pretty sure that none of the parts that we made was any good.
02:33Not a bad batch. Not a slow month. None. From a factory built to make the tools that make
02:41everything else. Now think about what that sentence is up against. The men in that factory were starving.
02:48Guards walked the camp with fixed bayonets. Beatings for small offenses were routine.
02:55Every part the prisoners touched went through Japanese foremen and technicians.
03:00And two days after that walk to the new camp, they would learn exactly what the Japanese army
03:05did to Americans who defied it. So how does a factory full of watched, hungry, frightened men
03:12end up producing nothing that works? And why couldn't the most industrialized nation in Asia
03:18stop it? The American prisoners at Mukden answered that question with their hands. And paid for it.
03:24If you want to see how, like this video and subscribe. It helps their story reach more people.
03:29To understand what happened inside MKK, you have to start with an order given in Tokyo.
03:35On June 25, 1942, General Hideki Tojo, Japan's prime minister and war minister,
03:43spoke to the newly appointed chiefs of Japan's prisoner of war camps.
03:47His words survive in the judgment of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
03:51Prisoners, he told them, must not be allowed to lie idle doing nothing but eating freely for
03:57even a single day. Their labor and technical skill should be fully utilized for the replenishment
04:03of production. Hold on to two words in that order. Technical skill. They are going to come back. And when
04:10they do, they will mean something Tojo never intended. That autumn, the order became a ship.
04:16The Totori Maru left Manila with American prisoners packed into its holds. And the voyage stretched
04:22past a month. Formosa, then Korea. Off Formosa, an American submarine fired at the ship.
04:31Ralph Griffith, a 19-year-old from Hannibal, Missouri, remembered torpedoes just missing the ship
04:37on either side. From Pusan, a train carried them north. On November 11, 1942, 1202 Americans arrived
04:47at Mukden. Fourteen officers, 1188 enlisted men. Their senior officer was Major Stanley Hankins.
04:56Their first home was a set of old Chinese army barracks, built partly underground.
05:02Manchurian winter was already closing in. That winter, the temperature would drop to 40 below zero.
05:09Do the arithmetic the way the Japanese army should have. Mitsubishi wanted skilled workers. Tokyo wanted
05:16every one of them working. 1,200 Americans had just been delivered within a few miles of a war factory.
05:23All anyone had to do was keep them alive until spring. They didn't.
05:29By the time the prisoners made that walk to the new camp in July, 205 of them were dead.
05:35More than one in six of the enlisted men who had stepped off the train. Remember that number.
05:41Most people who tell this story go straight to the machines. But the first reason nothing worked at MKK
05:47had nothing to do with any machine, and it was set in motion by the Japanese themselves.
05:53And two days after the move, on July 31, the camp commander, Colonel Genji Matsuda,
05:59had an announcement for the prisoners. It concerned three Americans who had cut through the wire six
06:05weeks earlier. What he told them would stand behind every man at every machine for the next two years.
06:12Before we hear what Colonel Matsuda said that morning, go back to the winter that came first.
06:18Because the Japanese army made its first move against its own factory,
06:22before most of these Americans had touched a single machine. That move was a bowl of food.
06:29In June 1942, a war ministry official in Tokyo had put the principle in writing.
06:36Even officer prisoners would work, he explained, because not one person now eats without working.
06:44At Mukden, the historian Gregory Irwin estimates, the prisoners got roughly half the 4,000 calories a
06:51day that the U.S. Army recommended for its own men. These were men who had already survived Bataan,
06:57or Corregidor, months in Philippine camps, and a month in a ship's hold. Now they were asked to
07:04survive a Manchurian winter on half a diet. They couldn't. Ken Towery watched it from inside the
07:11barracks. It was too cold to dig any graves, he said, so they just stacked them up. Robert Rosendahl
07:18was too sick for factory work, so he was given a different job. He stripped the bodies of the dead.
07:26Every man had two dog tags. One went to the camp commandant. The other went into the dead man's mouth,
07:33so that someone, someday, could tell who he was. When the prisoners complained about frostbite,
07:39a Japanese doctor gave them an answer Towery repeated 50 years later. When the Japanese army
07:46conquered Manchuria, the Japanese army conquered frostbite. By March 1943, the camp had buried 176
07:55Americans. Most had died within their first 90 days in Manchuria. When the ground finally thawed that
08:02spring, work parties went out to dig graves for the men who had been waiting in the stacks.
08:08Now hold that number up against Tojo's two words.
08:12Technical skill. Each of those 176 was a pair of hands Mitsubishi had asked for and the army had
08:20shipped across an ocean. In 90 days, the Japanese system threw away roughly one in seven of the workers
08:26it had gone to such trouble to collect. No American had to sabotage anything for that to happen.
08:32That is the first piece of the answer. Before the prisoners ever moved next door to the factory,
08:38the workforce of MKK was half-starved, frostbitten, and burying its friends. Hungry men make mistakes.
08:46But here is what the Japanese never fully grasped. Not every mistake at MKK was going to be an accident.
08:54The winter taught the Americans one more thing. Nobody was coming for them soon. And some of them
09:01decided not to wait. On the night of June 21, 1943, three men cut through the wire. Sergeant Joseph
09:10Chastain, a Marine from Waco, Texas. Corporal Victor Pagliotti, a Marine from Cranston, Rhode Island.
09:18And seaman first-class Ferdinand Marengolo, a sailor from Brooklyn. Oliver Allen, a fellow prisoner,
09:26called Chastain, one of those guys who couldn't stand confinement. They had a map obtained with the
09:32help of a Chinese worker named Gal Dechen. They needed more than a map. Another prisoner, Randall Edwards,
09:39put the problem in one line. We were 800 miles from the Siberian border.
09:45They walked by night. Eleven nights. A little over a hundred miles.
09:51On July 2, near a village called Liangjiazhi, they were spotted. In the fight that followed,
09:58a local policeman was stabbed and died. Villagers smoked the three Americans out of the brush
10:03and handed them over to the Japanese. Back at the camp, the reaction had already begun.
10:10Colonel Matsuda called the escape the most outrageous and unfortunate trouble.
10:16Thirty men were given ten days of heavy confinement. Six suspected of helping were beaten.
10:23On July 6, the three escapees were brought back to camp.
10:28The new camp, by every account, was better than the old one. Brick instead of half-buried wood.
10:34A hospital. A little more food. Then, on July 31, two days after the move to the new barracks,
10:42Matsuda made his announcement. The three Americans had been executed at dawn.
10:48Washington would not get official Japanese confirmation for almost a year, and only through the
10:52Swiss. Gaode Chun, the Chinese worker who had helped with the map, was sentenced to five years.
10:59Joseph Patak, one of the prisoners, wrote that the executions left a mark on us.
11:05Now look at this from the Japanese side, because it matters for everything that comes next.
11:10In the space of a few weeks, Colonel Matsuda had done what any prison commander would want.
11:15He had shown the Americans the price of open defiance. A cut fence, an empty bunk at roll call,
11:22three men on the run. Those were things the Japanese could see, count, and punish.
11:28And they had punished them in the most final way there is.
11:32But look at what that left the men who walked into MKK in August 1943.
11:37Not a lesson that resistance was hopeless, a lesson that resistance had to be invisible.
11:43It could not leave a hole in the fence, or an empty bunk. It had to happen in plain sight,
11:48under a guard's eyes, in a way that looked exactly like work.
11:53Remember Ken Towery's workbench, and that column of numbers only one side had actually measured.
11:59Linda Getz-Holmes spent more than 20 years researching American prisoners of the Japanese.
12:04Of all the sabotage stories she heard, she said the ones from Mukden were the best.
12:09And one of them began with a prisoner put in charge of blueprints, and an ordinary ruler.
12:15In early 1943, while the dead were still waiting in the stacks for the thaw,
12:20Roy Weaver volunteered for the tool and dye works, three miles from the old camp.
12:26Weaver was a marine corporal, 23 when he was captured on Fort Hughes, a small island fort in Manila Bay.
12:34He had a simple reason for volunteering.
12:37Men who worked at the factory got a soybean lunch and dinner.
12:41By the time he was liberated, his weight had climbed from 118 pounds to 140.
12:49Notice what that means.
12:50The Japanese had found the one lever that really worked on starving men – food.
12:57Every incentive at MKK pointed in the same direction – do the work, keep the job, eat.
13:05Weaver was put in the tool and dye shop, roughing out machine parts and calipers.
13:11And here it helps to understand what a tool and dye shop actually is, because it's the hinge of this
13:17whole story.
13:19It doesn't make rifles or airplanes. It makes the cutting tools, the dyes, the gauges,
13:24and the machines that other factories use to make rifles and airplanes.
13:28Ken Tauri remembered the product MKK was trying to build as a machine called an index machine.
13:35Randall Edwards remembered building lathes meant for turning out machine gun bullets.
13:40According to Linda Getz-Holmes, Mitsubishi wanted skilled men at Mukden for a tool and dye factory
13:46and an airplane parts factory. In a country that could no longer buy machine tools from Detroit,
13:51a plant like MKK was not a sideshow. It was a multiplier.
13:58Now follow that logic one step further. An error at MKK does not stay at MKK.
14:05A dye that is slightly wrong stamps a slightly wrong part, again and again, in some other factory,
14:12for some other man to discover. A lathe that fails fails in somebody else's workshop.
14:17Remember that. The shop floor itself was run by Japanese civilians and Weaver did not describe
14:24them as monsters. He said they treated the prisoners fairly well. At Christmas 1943, and again the next
14:31year, the supervisors shared whiskey with them. Better food. Decent bosses. A drink at Christmas.
14:40If there was ever a Japanese factory where American prisoners might simply do the work, this was it.
14:47We did a lousy job of making tools, Weaver said. Ken Towery put it the same way.
14:54We did our little things, as best we could, to screw it up.
14:58Little is the right word. Go back to the prisoner Holmes described, the one put in charge of blueprints.
15:05He didn't tear them up. He didn't draw anything a Japanese engineer would spot across the room.
15:11In Holmes's words, he would just take that ruler and be a little off in that design.
15:17Ralph Griffith, the young soldier from Hannibal, described the same thing from the shop floor.
15:23The men put bad dimensions on blueprints. They made parts they knew would not work.
15:29Now go back to that room from the beginning of this story. The Japanese drafting table on one side,
15:35the American with the machine on the other. How does a Japanese engineer check a measurement?
15:40He measures the part again himself. And if he has to measure every part again himself,
15:45why does he need the prisoner at all? The whole point of bringing skilled Americans to Mukden
15:51was that the Japanese would not have to do that work. That was the trap hidden inside Tojo's two words.
15:58If you need a prisoner's technical skill, you have to trust his technical skill.
16:04Randall Edwards described a second method, and it was even more patient.
16:08The men building those lathes slipped iron filings into the gearboxes. The machines ran. For a while.
16:17Then they seized. Edwards was a Navy man, 95 years old when he told that story. And he told it
16:24plainly.
16:26Think about the timing of that. A machine that dies on the test stand gets an inspector's attention.
16:32And then a guard's. And then someone gets taken to the guard house.
16:36A machine that passes inspection, leaves the plant, and dies days later in some other workshop,
16:42carries no fingerprints at all. The Associated Press, after interviewing the survivors decades later,
16:50summed up the rule they lived by. Sabotage was constant, but cautious. Robert Rosendahl said that
16:58getting caught could mean death. After July 31st, nobody at Mukden needed that explained.
17:06So here is the second piece of the answer, and it's sharper than the first.
17:11The Japanese had brought these men to Mukden, precisely because they knew things the Japanese
17:17needed. That knowledge was the one thing the guards could not watch. A guard can see whether a man is
17:25working. He cannot see whether the number the man writes down is true. And this is where Irwin
17:31Johnson's sentence starts to make sense. None of the parts was any good. Not because the Americans
17:38refused to work. Because they worked every day, exactly as Tojo had ordered, and put something into
17:46the work that no inspector could see. But a factory is not run by inspectors alone. It is run by
17:52managers
17:52with quotas. And quotas that are never met eventually get noticed. The Japanese did notice. Their answer
18:01did not come with a sword or a firing squad. It came with a new interpreter the prisoners nicknamed
18:06the Bongo Kid. A set of colored number plates and a theory about the men of the machines that turned
18:13out
18:14to be completely wrong. The Bongo Kid system was simple, and on paper it was clever. Every prisoner
18:21at the factory would be raided, and the raiding would be visible. A colored number plate. Red for trusted
18:28workers, blue for ordinary workers, and yellow for the slackers. The prisoner's word for them was
18:36gold bricks. A man on yellow stayed there for at least a week. A week of good work on blue
18:43earned
18:43red. Status, in other words, was something you earned by looking like a good worker.
18:50Our best account of how it played out comes from an Australian at Mukden, William Bell,
18:55who worked alongside the Americans at MKK. Bell estimated that about 60% of the men ended up wearing
19:02red. About 30% wore blue. Only about 10% were stuck on yellow. And output? Bell's verdict was blunt.
19:12It did not improve. The only thing the scheme added was cost.
19:18Stop and think about why. Because this is the moment the Japanese had the answer to their whole
19:23problem pinned to the prisoners' shirts, and read it upside down. The plates measured effort. Who showed
19:31up? Who kept moving? Who looked busy when a supervisor walked past? And by that measure,
19:37most of the men were model workers. But the damage at MKK was never in the effort.
19:43It was in the ruler that was a little off, and the filings inside a gearbox. A red plate did
19:50not
19:50mean a man was helping the factory. It only meant he was good at looking like it. That is the
19:56third
19:56piece of the answer. The Japanese were trying to fix a problem of quality with a tool built to measure
20:02obedience. Alongside the plates, the Japanese kept using the oldest tool they had. Lieutenant Teru Miki,
20:10when he served as Officer of the Day, did not bother sending offenders to the guardhouse. He beat them
20:16himself with a wooden club. A captain the prisoners called the Bull beat men with his sword, still in its
20:23scabbard. Roy Weaver took one severe beating from the bull. But a beating has a limit, and Ralph Griffith
20:30found it. One day at the factory, a fellow prisoner gave Griffith some tobacco. He tried to smuggle it
20:37back into camp. A search found it. The guards wanted one thing, the name of the man who had given
20:44it to him.
20:46They beat Griffith with a shoe to get it. He didn't give it. He went to the guardhouse instead,
20:53on short rations, for two weeks. It's a small story, a bit of tobacco. But look at what it shows
21:01about what the Japanese were up against. Every punishment at Mukden landed on one man, and one name,
21:08given up under a beating, could unravel everything else. Meanwhile, the sabotage was getting bigger.
21:17The factory needed a foundation for a huge lathe, a concrete pour. Roy Weaver said the prisoners threw
21:24perfectly usable tools into the wet cement. Robert Rosendahl described the same method,
21:30and he remembered how lightly the work details were guarded. About 50 prisoners to two or three guards.
21:35A good ratio for sabotage, he called it. The prisoners broke into crates of machinery.
21:42We'd break into these boxes and steal the gears out of the damn machines and throw them in the concrete,
21:47Rosendahl said. Drill bits went in too. Anything they could get. Now think about how that looked to a guard.
21:56Men carrying things. Men pouring concrete. Men working. And once the concrete set,
22:03the evidence was sealed inside a foundation the Japanese themselves had ordered built.
22:09They didn't realize we stripped them, Rosendahl said. 60 years after he arrived at Mukden,
22:15he added, there's a fortune in drill bits in the concrete still in Manchuria at this time,
22:20and they don't know it. Bell remembered one more exchange. After a search of the prisoners,
22:26the factory's tool store went up in flames and burned completely. Bell said the prisoners said it.
22:33The next day, whatever the fire had spared was broken up or carted off while the guards looked elsewhere.
22:39His phrase for it was, vandalism in a good cause.
22:43So by now, the contest at Mukden had a shape. The Japanese measured effort, and the Americans hid inside it.
22:51The Japanese beat individuals, and the names stayed hidden. The Japanese searched the men,
22:58and the tool store burned. The Japanese guarded the fence, and the Americans buried the factory's
23:04own tools in its floor. In June 1944, the Japanese made a different kind of move.
23:12According to the camp timeline compiled by researcher Roger Mansell, drawing on Linda Goetz Holmes,
23:18a group of American prisoners was taken out of Mukden and shipped to the lead mines at Kamioka,
23:24in Japan itself, as punishment for sabotage at the factory. Think about the assumption behind that.
23:32That sabotage was a Mukden problem. A few troublemakers in one camp. Remove them, send them somewhere
23:39harder, and the problem leaves with them. But they were sending those men to Japan, where American
23:44prisoners had been doing the same thing for more than a year, in shipyards, docks, and rail yards,
23:50without ever having heard of Mukden. One of them was a Navy machinist's mate from Massachusetts,
23:57who, on his second day in Yokohama, told the Japanese he was a plumber. What he did with the job
24:05that one lie
24:05got him, is where this story stops being about one factory.
24:10On November 28, 1942, 17 days after the Americans reached Mukden, more than 500 prisoners were packed
24:18into a waterfront warehouse in Yokohama, Japan. Earl Anderson was one of them.
24:24Anderson was 23, from Everett, Massachusetts, a machinist's mate off the submarine tender
24:30Canopus, captured when the Philippines fell. He weighed 115 pounds. He described the warehouse in
24:37one line, a space that we wouldn't put 500 pigs in. The camp supplied labor to the Mitsubishi shipyard,
24:45three miles away. The yard built ships for Japan's war, tankers among them, and every tanker mattered
24:52to an island empire that brought its oil in by sea. On his second day, the Japanese assigned the
24:58prisoners to work. Anderson's account of his own assignment is one sentence.
25:03I told them I was a plumber, so I was assigned to the pipe shop. His account doesn't say why.
25:10But notice what he didn't tell them. He didn't present himself as a navy machinist's mate,
25:14the kind of man trained to keep a ship's machinery running. In Tojo's language, he decided for himself
25:20how much technical skill Japan was going to get. The pipe shop bent pipe for ships under construction.
25:27Anderson thought the Japanese methods were badly outdated.
25:30Shifts ran ten hours a day, with two days off a month. And the prisoners had a rule,
25:36which Anderson stated plainly. We did as little as possible.
25:41That first winter, 29 Americans and 14 other prisoners died in the Oklahoma camp.
25:47Anderson's own weight would fall, at one point, to 75 pounds.
25:52When the men were caught by their foreman, he wrote, they were punched and slapped.
25:57Here is a detail worth holding onto. Not every Japanese face in that yard was hostile.
26:03A Japanese electric welder in the pipe shop, Anderson wrote, was a pretty decent sort,
26:08who gave him rest breaks and cigarettes. The shipyard's personnel supervisor, a man named Udo,
26:13did as much as he could for the prisoners. It is the same pattern as the Christmas whiskey at Mookden.
26:20Decent men on the other side. And it changed nothing about the work.
26:26In the spring of 1944, Anderson recorded what he had been doing.
26:31I threw nuts and bolts into a big diesel crankcase, broke a gas line, and broke an airline.
26:38Of the Japanese boss over him, he wrote, in many ways, I impede his production.
26:44Nuts and bolts in a crankcase. Think about when that gets discovered. Not when they fall in.
26:51When the engine turns over, long after the man who dropped them has gone back to his barracks.
26:581st Sergeant John Stensby, a coast artilleryman from Corregidor, appears on the roster of the same
27:04camp. He worked as a welder in the Mitsubishi yard. This is how he described his contribution.
27:11I cranked the transformer way on down so it wasn't hot enough to really weld.
27:16A cold weld looks like a weld. The bead is there, the seam is closed. What it lacks is the
27:23heat that
27:24fuses the metal, and you cannot see that from the outside. It is the shipyard's version of the ruler
27:30at Mukden. And the welding rods? We must have thrown a thousand welding rods in the bay.
27:38Anderson watched the pace of the yard from the pipe shop.
27:41It takes them at least six months to build a tanker, he wrote, and a year to build a seaplane
27:46tender.
27:47In American yards in those same years, a Liberty ship could go from keel to launch in a matter of
27:53weeks.
27:54Looking back, Anderson's judgment was quiet. I think we held them back.
28:00Now step back and look at the map. Mukden and Yokohama are roughly a thousand miles apart.
28:07The prisoners in one had no way to reach the prisoners in the other. No radio, no mail.
28:14Nobody in Washington had told them to do any of this. On the Osaka docks,
28:20marines captured on Guam had started in the summer of 1942, punching holes in oil barrels,
28:26breaking winches, pouring sand into engines. Glenn Frazier, a Bataan Death March survivor sent to
28:32Japan that October, put the whole thing in one sentence. We decided we would sabotage everything we
28:38could. We decided, not we were ordered. That is the fourth piece of the answer,
28:45and it changes everything before it. Mukden was not one clever camp. It was the same choice,
28:52made separately, by American prisoners who had handed over their weapons, but not their war.
28:58Which raises a question. Why did a system built to squeeze work out of prisoners never see this coming?
29:05Part of the answer sits in a small booklet issued to Japanese soldiers in Tojo's name
29:09in January 1941. We will come to it. But first, the war itself came to Mukden.
29:17On December 7, 1944, three years almost to the day after Pearl Harbor, the prisoners at Mukden heard
29:24engines over Manchuria. American engines. B-29s flying from bases in China were heading for the
29:32aircraft plant near the camp. Before the raid was over, American bombs would land inside the wire.
29:39How many men died that day is the easy part to tell. Why the camp was standing where it was
29:45is the part that matters. When the bombers came over on December 7, many of the prisoners were out on
29:50the
29:50camp parade ground. William Bell, the Australian, was one of them. A bomb landed about 30 feet from him.
29:57The ground was frozen so hard that it went in only about 18 inches before it exploded.
30:04Ralph Griffith was in his barracks. Two bombs struck it. A buddy lying about three feet from him was killed
30:11by shrapnel. Ken Towery remembered the day in a single sentence. They killed 19 people with one bomb.
30:1919 prisoners died and more than 30 were wounded. Among the dead were Leon Skibicki from Camden,
30:26New Jersey, Leon Jetty, and Arthur Lane. Most of them had come through the fall of the Philippines,
30:32the voyage north, the first Manchurian winter, and the factory. They were killed by American bombs
30:39inside a Japanese prison camp. One more detail. The day before the raid, on December 6, delegates of the
30:47International Committee of the Red Cross had made their second visit to the camp. They came and went.
30:52The camp stayed where it was. So why was it there? The camp was unmarked. It sat near an airfield
31:00and
31:00beside an ammunition factory. Towery put it plainly. They had a stuck-down close to the aircraft factory.
31:08The Geneva Convention of 1929 says no prisoner may be sent to an area where he would be exposed to
31:14the
31:14fire of the fighting zone. Japan had never ratified it. But in early 1942, Tokyo told the Allies it would
31:22apply its terms, with whatever changes were necessary. But you don't need a treaty to explain where the
31:28camp stood. You only need Tojo's order. If prisoners exist to work, they have to live next to the work.
31:35If the work is war production, they live next to the targets. The Japanese plan had made the Americans
31:42part of the machine, and now the American war had come for the machine. Now picture that December sky
31:49from both directions at once. Above Mukden, B-29 crews were attacking Manchuria's war industry with high
31:56explosives. Below them, men who had never met those crews had been attacking the same industry for almost two
32:04years, with a ruler, a handful of iron filings, and wet concrete. One group could see the target.
32:12The other was standing inside it. Neither knew about the other. It was the same campaign. After the raid,
32:20the wounded needed medicine. The prisoners pulled it out of their own personal packages until the Japanese
32:26finally agreed to release it. Then they dug slit trenches. Two weeks later, the connection became
32:33literal. On December 21st, B-29s hit Mukden again. About 14 American airmen came down and were captured,
32:42and the Japanese held them near the camp until the war ended. Griffith later said the news the prisoners
32:49had waited years to hear came to them through airmen like these. Now the danger changed shape.
32:57For two years, the risk at Mukden had been getting caught. As the war closed in, the risk became what
33:03the Japanese would do with their prisoners when the end came. Remember the three escapees of July 1943.
33:10The Japanese had already shown what they would do to a few. The question now was what they would do
33:16to all of them. On August 1st, 1944, the headquarters of the prisoner of war camps on Formosa made an
33:24entry in its journal that was later translated as evidence for the war crimes trials. It covered what
33:30to do with prisoners in an emergency. Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however
33:37it is done, it said, dispose of them as the situation dictates. The aim was to annihilate them all and
33:46not to
33:46leave any traces. That journal came from Formosa, not Manchuria, and no such order for Mukden has been
33:53found. But the Japanese historian Toru Fukubayashi, who studied the records, put it this way. It appears
34:00that the Japanese army did have a policy to kill all the POWs if Allied forces landed on Japanese home
34:07islands.
34:09Through the spring and summer of 1945, the camp filled up. On April 29th, 134 men arrived from Japan,
34:18103 of them survivors of the hellship Orioku Maru. In May, senior Allied officers were moved in,
34:26among them Major General George Parker, who had commanded a corps on Bataan. General Jonathan Wainwright
34:32himself, the man who had surrendered Corregidor, had been brought to Manchuria the previous November
34:38and was held at a small camp north of Mukden. On August 6th, the guards turned on the prisoners.
34:45They beat and abused them, and the men had no idea why. That day, a single American bomb had destroyed
34:53Hiroshima. Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and Soviet armies poured into Manchuria.
35:02Mukden lay in their path. So picture Mukden in the second week of August, 1945. More than 1,600 prisoners
35:10in the main camp and its branches. A Japanese garrison watching its war collapse. A Soviet army racing
35:18toward the city. And, at an American base far away in China, a small team getting ready to parachute into
35:25the middle of it. How the men guarding those prisoners had been taught to see a prisoner was written down
35:31in Tojo's booklet in 1941. It is the last piece of the answer. The booklet was called the Senjinkun,
35:39the Field Service Code. It was issued to Japanese soldiers on January 8, 1941, 11 months before Pearl
35:47Harbor, in the name of the army minister, Hideki Tojo. It was small enough to carry in a pocket.
35:54Most of it is about duty, loyalty, and honor. But one line became famous, and it is usually translated
36:01like this. Never live to experience shame as a prisoner. Read that the way a Japanese soldier was
36:09meant to read it. A prisoner is not a soldier who has lost a battle. He is a man who
36:14has failed
36:15completely. Whatever war he had is over. Now put that line next to the order you've been carrying
36:22since the start of this story. June 25, 1942. The same Tojo, telling his camp chiefs that prisoners
36:30must not lie idle for a single day, and that their technical skill should be fully utilized.
36:36Two documents. One name. And between them, the whole answer. The first document told the Japanese
36:43army what a prisoner was. A man whose war was over. The second told it what to do with him.
36:51Put his skill
36:52to work for Japan's war industry. So the system rested on two assumptions at once. The Americans in its
36:59camps were finished as fighters. And they were valuable as workers. Look back at every Japanese
37:07move in this story, and you can see both assumptions at work. What did the system guard against? Escape.
37:14A man leaving. That is what the fence was for, and the executions on July 31st.
37:21Idleness. Idleness. A man not working. That is what the colored plates were for, and Lieutenant Miki's
37:28club, and the foreman who slapped Earl Anderson. A body leaving. A body standing still.
37:36Those were the two kinds of resistance the Japanese were built to catch.
37:40What the system had no place for was a third kind. A man who stays. A man who works, 10
37:48hours a day,
37:49wearing a red plate, and is still at war. Under the Japanese code, that man should not exist. A soldier
37:57who surrendered was finished. So the Japanese built everything around watching American bodies,
38:03and then handed American minds the one job that mattered. Deciding what a measurement was.
38:10How hot a weld should be. What went into a gearbox, a crankcase, a foundation.
38:17That is what those two words, technical skill, turned out to mean. Tojo meant a resource to be harvested.
38:26For the men it was harvested from, it was the last weapon they had, and the only one no guard
38:32could take
38:33from them at the gate. Now the pieces fit. The starvation winter. Japan wrecking its own workforce,
38:40because men who had surrendered were never a priority. The ruler that was a little off.
38:47Skill the Japanese had to trust, because it was the reason they had brought the men.
38:52The colored plates. A system that measured obedience, because obedience was all it expected from
38:58finished men. And Glenn Frazier's, we decided. The one thing the code said a prisoner no longer had
39:07the right to do. So why did nothing work in Japanese factories full of American prisoners?
39:13Because Japan could command an American's hands, and never understood that the war had moved somewhere
39:19else. Into the judgment behind those hands. Into a decision made fresh every day by starving,
39:27watched men, about whether the part in front of them would be any good.
39:32Go back to Erwin Johnson's sentence. None of the parts that we made was any good.
39:38It was never a note about quality control. It was a report from the front.
39:44The Japanese code had one more test to face, and this time it was a Japanese officer who had to
39:50face it.
39:52On August 16, 1945, the day after Emperor Hirohito's surrender broadcast, an American B-24 crossed over
40:01Mukden in daylight. Japan's surrender had been announced, but nobody could be sure the garrison in
40:07Manchuria would accept it. At about 10.30 in the morning, a small OSS team jumped. The mission was
40:15codenamed Cardinal. Its job was to protect the prisoners. Corporal Hal Leith was 26, from Butte,
40:22Montana. With him were Major Hennessy, the team leader, Major Robert Lamar, a doctor, Sergeant Edward
40:29Stars, and Sergeant Fumio Kido, the team's interpreter. A Chinese soldier who jumped with
40:36them ran off. Japanese troops took them almost at once. Some of the team were blindfolded,
40:42stripped, and beaten. The Kempeitai commander holding them, Leith said, had not been told to
40:47surrender in Manchuria. Think about where that left them. Five Americans held by men raised on a code
40:55that called captivity the ultimate shame, and who were now being asked to surrender themselves.
41:01Then a Japanese colonel arrived. He apologized. He offered the Americans sake and whiskey.
41:08And he offered them a choice that says everything about the gulf between the two armies.
41:14He would surrender, or, if they preferred, he would commit ritual suicide. Set that beside the men behind
41:21the wire at Houghton. More than three years as prisoners. And by their own reckoning, not one day
41:27of it spent out of the war. Leith and the others still had to reach the camp. And when they
41:33did,
41:33the Japanese storerooms at Mukden would tell the prisoners one last thing about how little they had
41:38ever mattered to the men who held them. The storerooms were full. Red Cross parcels that had never been
41:44handed out. Letters from home, some of them held back for as long as two years. Think back to the
41:51first winter, and the bodies in the stacks. To the wounded after the December raid, treated with
41:56medicine from the prisoners' own packages. Some of what might have helped them had sat in Japanese
42:02storerooms for as long as two years. On August 18th, leaflets over Mukden announced Japan's surrender.
42:10The next day, the first Red Army troops arrived, and the prisoners held Thanksgiving services.
42:16On August 20th, a Soviet general walked into the camp and told them they were free. Ken Tauri was
42:23precise about it. They were technically the ones that liberated us. Ralph Griffith was posted at the
42:30main gate when Japanese soldiers, prisoners themselves now, came looking for shelter. They were turned away.
42:37On his first day of freedom, a Chinese girl of about six led him to a family's home,
42:41where he was fed and given rice wine. He later gave her every blanket and everything else he could spare.
42:49Howe Leith and Major Lamar went by train to find the generals, and on August 26th,
42:54they came back with Jonathan Wainwright. He was very grateful that we were there, Leith said.
43:00The next day, Wainwright was flown out. A week later, he stood on the deck of the USS Missouri
43:06in Tokyo Bay and watched Japan sign the surrender. In September, the rest left by train for the port of
43:14Dairan and the sea. Even then, the war took a few more. In a typhoon off Okinawa, about 10 of
43:21them were
43:22lost overboard from the USS Colbert. Go back to where this story started. July 29th, 1943.
43:31A 20-year-old from Corregidor at a workbench, a machine from Detroit in pieces in front of him,
43:37and a column of numbers only he had measured. We will never know exactly what Ken Towery wrote in
43:42that column. All he ever said was, We did our little things. Ken Towery came home to Texas
43:49and became a newspaper man. In 1954, working for the small Quero record, he began asking questions
43:57about the state's veterans' land program. Local businessmen were paying poor veterans,
44:03many of them unable to read, to sign land applications and pocketing the money.
44:09Many of those veterans never knew they had bought land at all. Towery's story ran on November 14, 1954.
44:17The land commissioner, Bascom Giles, went to prison. In 1955, at 32, the former prisoner won the Pulitzer
44:27Prize. Look at the two halves of that life. At Mukden, he wrote down the numbers nobody else could check.
44:35In Texas, he checked the numbers nobody else would, on behalf of veterans who could not check them
44:43themselves. He died in 2016, at 93. Robert Rosendahl went on to fight in Korea as an infantryman,
44:51and later worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Roy Weaver went back to Shenyang in April 2007,
44:58and found the barracks still standing, being turned into a museum, with the prisoners' names on its
45:04walls. He died in 2010. Ralph Griffith went back that same year and left his uniform and medals there.
45:13For decades, he had not talked about the camp, not even to his wife. Later, he visited Japan as a
45:20guest of its government and said he no longer held any animosity. Earl Anderson, the machinist's mate who
45:28told the Japanese he was a plumber, left the Navy in 1946 as a chief machinist's mate. Then he went
45:35to
45:35work at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston until 1964. The same hands. A shipyard again. Only this time,
45:44the work was for his own Navy. He died in 2013. On July 19, 2015, in Los Angeles, a senior
45:54executive
45:55of Mitsubishi Materials apologized to the American prisoners who had been forced to work in its mines.
46:01James Murphy, 94, a baton survivor who had dug copper for the company, accepted it.
46:07I find it to be my duty and responsibility, he said, to accept Mr. Kimura's apology.
46:14Somewhere under a factory floor in Shenyang, if Robert Rosendahl was right, there is still
46:19a fortune in drill bits sealed in concrete. Set the Japanese code beside all of that.
46:25Never live to experience shame as a prisoner. By that code, every one of these men should have
46:31come home finished. Instead, they came home and built whole lives, and some of them were still
46:37telling the story at 91 around a reunion table in New Orleans. Nothing worked in those factories
46:44because the men at the machines had never stopped being American fighting men. Japan took their weapons
46:50in 1942. It never took their war.
46:53Thank you for watching, and for staying with the American prisoners of Mukden and Yokohama to the
46:58end of their story. If it meant something to you, please give the video a like. It helps stories
47:05like this reach people who have never heard them. Subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't miss the
47:10next one. And tell me in the comments where you're watching from. If your father, grandfather,
47:17or uncle served with the Allies in the Second World War, write his name and his unit below.
47:23Every name you leave is one more man who served who won't be forgotten.