The War is Over

Well, we actually found out one morning, we just got up and we were, we had stopped going to the mine so that was another indication that something was up in the air. We weren’t going to the mine, and the Japs, the guards were pretty casual and just about ten o’clock in the morning this American fighter plane came over and he dipped his wings and he started dropping leaflets and of course they fluttered all over and we picked them up and there was a message. What we were to do was to lay out an area so many, so big so that when the transport plane or bomber come over, could drop this food and medicine and so that’s what we did. We went out there with, we even wasted our flour, what little flour they had in the kitchen there and anything we could find that would make a mark and we laid out a big square in the middle of the parade square, in the middle of the camp and sure enough, two days later this big bomber came over - barrels of food and medicine, everything was dropping down. Of course, some of it, the chute didn’t open and it just splattered all over the place. Then we got orders that after this, oh another three or four days after that, after we got the food, we got a message by the same fighter plane that we were to... By this time the Japs, the guards had just off and left, there wasn’t a guard in the place any place, they just... We were there free, but of course we didn’t know where to go. We got this, the plane dropped some more leaflets and they told us, give us direction, little maps and they give us direction to go down this hill to, there’d be a little lake and by the lake there’d be a railway track. We were to wait there for a train directed by some Americans and they would pick us up and take us to Yokohama.