I am sure a lot of students have visions of having teachers
locked up. My 5th grade
teacher was a POW during World War 2 and I
recently got my hands on a book he wrote of his experiences. In my blog are a number of stories of my
year with Mr. Biggs at Bradley Creek Elementary School. A good place to start reading about them is a
post I made shortly after his death. To read this post, click
here.
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| The cover photo is of the author He's dressed in his cold weather uniform |
Chester M. Biggs, Behind
the Barbed Wire (1995, Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Co, 2011), 224 pages, some photos and maps.
On the morning of December 8, 1941, the Marine guards at the
American consulates in Peiping (Beijing) and Tientsin, China woke up behind
enemy lines. Overnight (on the other
side of the International Date Line), the Japanese had attacked Pearl
Harbor. The Japanese had invaded China
several years earlier and the American consulates were now inside territory
held by the Japanese army. Although it
was a tense situation in the Far East and war was not out of the question, the
marines were caught unaware. They were
in the process of packing up and were days away from being withdrawn from China
(many of the military members and diplomats of other nations such as Britain
had already been withdrawn). As the war
began, the ship sailing to North China to pick up the Marines turned south and
those left behind were prisoners of war.
They would spend the entire war as POWs.
One of these Marines, PFC Chester Biggs, the author of this book, was
also my fifth grade teacher. Mr. Biggs would
spend 20 years in the Marine Corp (1939-1959).
The latter half of his life he spent in education. Mr. Biggs died a few years ago, but from what
I learned about him, until his death, he would spend time
teaching and answering questions for each of the Special Forces POW classes taught
at Fort Bragg. He died in December 2011 at the age of 90.
The book begins by describing the events of December 8,
1941. Only hours before the Marines
awoke, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
The Marines had no idea what was happening or that the day meant war as
the Japanese surrounded the compound, disarming the sentries, and forcing their
surrender. Biggs, a young man of 20,
finds himself as a POW. The next two
chapters, Biggs described life in Peiping before the war. China had been at war with Japan for years
and the area of the consulate had been securely controlled by the
Japanese. The situation in the
countryside, where there were Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese, was
tense and movement by American personnel there was limited. However, inside the
city, where there was quite large contingent of foreigners, life continued as
normal. Peiping, at least in the
international section, was a cosmopolitan city with Europeans, Russians and Americans living there.
During this time, there were fancy parties and even premiers for movies
such as “Gone with the Wind.” There were
some tension with Japanese soldiers, but with the exception of a few incidents,
it appears much was done on both sides remain calm. After the one incident, US military personnel
were restricted to a few clubs near the compound.
At first, after the surrender, the main change that the
Marines noticed was a loss of freedom of movement, the loss of their Chinese
workers (they had Chinese laborers that did many of their task from laundry to
manicures) and a reduction in food. Even
though they were confined to the compound, one Marine who had girlfriend in the
city slipped out and then came back undetected.
The NCOs tried to impress upon
the Marines of the serious of such actions, but two others slipped out and were
caught. Although the Japanese had said
anyone caught attempting to escape would be shot, they were not. As Biggs noted, the Japanese could and would
be brutal, but their behavior wasn’t always consistent. Although they were often brutal, at times
they surprised everyone. At the end of
January 1942, the Marines in Peiping were transferred to Tientsin and were
later transferred to a POW camp near Shanghai.
Before the transfer, the Japanese allowed a Marine from Tientsin requested
to marry his English fiancé before they were moved to Shanghai. His request was granted. During Christmas
1942, the Japanese allowed an American restaurateur who ran a famous establishment
in the city to prepare a Christmas dinner for the POWs. But this was the last great meal they enjoyed
for before the next Christmas, all expats in the city including this man were
confined into concentration camps by the Japanese.
At first the Marines who had been on diplomatic duty were
hopeful they would be exchanged and freed. The diplomats in China were exchanged six
months into the war. Such hope began to
wane as they were placed into a POW camp in Shanghai that included Marines and civilian
contractors from Wake Island and British sailors on a ship captured in a
Chinese port at the beginning of the war among others. Interestingly, in 1943, they were joined by
Italian Marines stationed in China. They
had been left along as they were part of the Axis, but once Italy surrendered
and then declared war on Germany, members of the Italian military in China
found themselves as POWs and bunking with Americans and British POWs. In the Shanghai area, the Marines were held
in two different camps. They were worked
hard and the Japanese capturers could be incredible brutal. The POWs did what they could to keep their
spirits up and Biggs tells many incredible and sometimes humorous stories of
survival and endurance. There was even a
radio which provided a little news of the war (which was spread via rumor for
no one was to know about the radio).
In 1945, the POWs were locked into rail cars and shipped
north and then down through Korea. The
travel was hard. In Pusan, they were
placed on a ship bound for southern Japan.
Once on Japanese soil, they were shipped by train north. Although they could see only a little (the
Japanese had covered the windows) they were able to see the devastation done to
Japanese cities from American bombing as they moved north. They knew the war couldn’t last much
longer. The Marines were taken to Hokkaido,
where they were put working inside coal mines.
This was brutal work and from the book I have the sense it was the worse
of Biggs entire imprisonment. The
Americans were split up and sent to smaller camps where they worked in teams
with a Korean miner underground. After
the Japanese surrender, the POWs stayed at the camp as American planes dropped
supplies. It was well into September
that Biggs had his first airplane flight in his life as he was being moved from
Hokkaido to Yokohama. However, bad weather
forced the plane to turn back. He would
later take a ship south and then on to Guam where the POWs were seen by doctors
and navy intelligence officers who record their experiences. From Guam, they were flown across the Pacific,
with stops for hospital visits at Honolulu (to be checked for infectious
diseases and parasites) and then on to a hospital in San Francisco.
Mr. Biggs was 18 when he left his home in Oklahoma for the
Marine Corps training base in San Diego.
He was 24 when he returned home on an extended leave after having been a
POW for over 3 ½ years. I found this
book to be well written and to give great detail of everyday life in a POW
camp. I wish I had read it while Mr.
Biggs was still alive.
