LAKE COUNTY ? David Broaddus came within hours of being executed in a World War II prison camp.
Broaddus is now a retired teacher who lives in Lucerne and serves as a chaplain at Sutter Lakeside Hospital. A week ago today marked the 64th anniversary of his liberation, a day forever fixed in his memory because of what he learned about a month later: he and all of the other men older than 16 were to be shot the next day.
“It still gives me goose bumps every time I think about it,” Broaddus said.
His father and stepmother lived in Hong Kong, then a British colony, as Christian missionaries for more than 10 years. Then in 1940, the threat of Japanese invasion forced his Canadian stepmother to evacuate with Broaddus and his six siblings to the Philippines for safety.
“My father said we were on U.S. soil now, so we did not go on to Australia as others did,” Broaddus said.
Japanese forces invaded in 1942. American forces declared Manila an open city to prevent fighting in the streets. Broaddus and his family became faces in the crowd of approximately 7,000 civilian prisoners of war held in a prison camp on the campus of a Catholic university in the northern part of the city.
“We thought it would be just a registration and we would be allowed to go home again, but it turned out it was three years, one month and one day we were there,” Broaddus said.
Broaddus remembered that the American forces left the city for the Bataan peninsula, where they were nearly annihilated. A month later, the POWs were made to watch the defeated American troops march through the city.
“When American planes would come over Manila, we would go out to watch the dogfights, and the Japanese would shoo us inside. If that didn”t work ? in several instances they would take a couple and make them stare at the sun till they went blind,” Broaddus said.
Psychological warfare made an impression on Broaddus, who was 15 when three British seamen in the camp tried to escape to have a beer. The men were caught and made to dig their own graves and stand at the foot of the graves.
“I remember a Japanese captain taking off his belt buckle and hitting the faces of the seamen until they were pulp, then he ordered that they were to be shot,” Broaddus said.
“It made me hate the Japanese. Then I realized as a Christian that hatred does not become a Christian. I got to thinking about how God was in control,” Broaddus said.
Food rations were cut to half a cup of rice a day in 1944, when American troops began to make headway in Asia. Prisoners ate dogs, cats and rats for protein, according to Broaddus. He estimated that a third of the camp”s population died of beriberi, a water retention disease caused by malnourishment.
The night of Feb. 3, 1945 was like any other night in the prison camp.
“We were going to bed, tired and hungry. Suddenly it seemed like the sky lit up with tracer bullets, and we couldn”t understand what was going on. The Filipinos who lived across the street from the camp shouted, ?Americanos are coming!” and then hastily closed their windows again.
“The next thing we knew, we all rushed to the main building to meet the American troops, but they did not come in through the main gate. A big tank came in through the wall with machine guns blazing,” Broaddus said. “We didn”t know that the main army hadn”t come in; it was just 700 American soldiers in a city of 22,000 Japanese soldiers.”
American tanks circled the camp all night, firing machine guns until American troops fought their way into the city from the north.
Broaddus gets a greeting card from the tank commander every Feb. 3, and still carries the lessons he learned inside the camp.
“One thing I learned in there is that you find the basic nature of a person in such circumstances. Those that were optimistic became more optimistic that the future looked brighter. People who were negative became more negative, thinking everything was lost,” Broaddus said.
Contact Tiffany Revelle at trevelle@record-bee.com, or call her directly at 263-5636 ext. 37.
