69 years ago my uncle was slowly starving in a Japanese POW camp after enduring the death march.
My Grandfather (taken at the fall of Corrigedor) always said it was pretty close to a death sentence if you were over 6 feet tall in captivity. He was 84 pounds when he was liberated from a Hitachi copper mine on the mainland. When I was little, sometimes he'd jokingly refer to it as being "guest of the Japanese Emperor", but when I got old enough to come home late and they were visiting or I was at their place, I'd hear him having dreams about it (Pops too, who was a decorated helo pilot during Vietnam). THAT really brings it home...
“My Grandfather (taken at the fall of Corrigedor) always said it was pretty close to a death sentence if you were over 6 feet tall in captivity.”
My Tio Ernesto lied to the Japanese that he was a cobbler and got an extra ration of rice for fixing their boots that he shared with his friend who had been beaten very badly during the march. He survived, but came home messed up. He had very strange quirks about food. As a kid, we thought he was just crazy (which he was, really), but as I got older I was told the real reason. That’s when it hit home for me.