Free Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling Page B

was impregnable.
    Of course, the Japanese soon got wind of what was going on. There was nothing to do but move the camp six or seven miles farther back and higher into the Zambales range, which runs along the west coast of central Luzon. William Fassoth, who wrote a brief history of his camps after the war, pays tribute to the famished and weakened Americans who helped him lug everything from the first camp up narrow, slippery mountain trails to the second. I can say only that I will never forget dragging myself to the second camp.
    The new camp consisted of one large building about fifty by a hundred feet and several smaller ones, all made entirely of bamboo and without nails. Filipinos are geniuses with bamboo. They make everything out of it: cooking utensils, drinking cups, woven baskets, animal snares, fish traps, scabbards for bolo knives, bridges—anything from tweezers to houses.
    The locale of the new camp was ideal, isolated high in the mountains and so near running water that a bamboo pipe carried water into the camp and a nearby waterfall provided a continuous and convenient shower. Nonetheless, the whole enterprise had a near-fatal flaw. If the camp was not to be spotted by enemy reconnaissance planes, it was necessary to do something that was mad, medically. The undergrowth was cleared away but all large trees were left intact for camouflage. Thus, the natural habitat of the mosquito was left substantially undisturbed. Soon the rainy season commenced. Nobody has seen rain until he has seen it in the Philippines. Many downpours would have been called cloudbursts in the United States, yet they went on for hours, day after day. The mountain streams swelled into torrents. While this had the incidental benefit of keeping the enemy away, it made it much harder to procure food or medicine and it allowed the mosquitoes to multiply. This stifled what little progress many of us might have made in our constant battle with diseases. Several timesour rice supply was so seriously depleted that we boiled rice husks and ate them. They were tasteless, but they did combat beri beri somewhat.
    One incident during this era of semi-starvation I will never forget. Vincente managed to get us a considerable quantity of navy beans, the sort universally reviled in World War I but now regarded as manna from heaven by those of us who had eaten little but rice for months. Mrs. Catalina Dimacal Fassoth, William’s Filipina wife, who gave unselfishly of her time cooking and trying to care for us, prepared the feast. We lined up with our bamboo tableware in ardent anticipation. With my first bite I was astounded. Judging from the looks on the faces of the others, so were they. Filipinos like sugar and prepare many of their foods with it. Mrs. Fassoth, knowing nothing about navy beans, had thrown a lot of sugar into the water when she boiled them. But we ate them.
    Something should be said here of the Fassoth camps in general, for they have been the subject of markedly different postwar accounts. At one time or another there were three of them, each situated farther back in the mountain fastness than its predecessor. It has been claimed that as many as three hundred American soldiers were in and out of one or another of the camps at various times, with anywhere from sixty to ninety at any one time, though these numbers are probably inflated. 2 As many as seventy-five Filipino porters were employed to carry in food at different times. I lived in the first camp for a few days and in the second for five months.
    A particularly dark description of the second one is given by Forbes Monaghan, who never saw the camp and who must have derived his information from two Jesuit scholastics from his Manila college who once spent a day and a night with us. Monaghan says we were fed regularly, but were so undisciplined, demoralized, and wolfish that we were little better than animals. He asserts that a West Point captain, Samuel Dosch, was the only sane