Bert Jerman

U.S. Army Air Forces
POW
Pacific Theater

“…every two or three days they would come around with a bucket of steamed rice. You could stick your hand in and whatever you could get in your hand, that was your rations.”

Bert Jerman was serving on the Philippines when he was captured by the Japanese and survived the infamous Bataan Death March. He was a POW throughout World War II. His story is one of the will to survive and a horsehead pipe that survived with him.

I was born in Hayden, Arizona, February 24, 1918—a World War I baby. I was enlisted in the Air Force. I was a Tech Sergeant in communications. My highest rank was Warrant Officer W4.

In May 1941, I was serving in the Air Force at Kelly Field, Texas. My area of expertise was that of a radio repairman and operator. I received a transfer to Clark Field, Philippine Islands. My point of embarkment was Ft. Mason in the San Francisco Bay. I had a two day shore leave just prior to sailing. While in San Francisco, I ran across a tobacco shop, which had several hand-carved brier-smoking pipes on display in the window. One in particular caught my eye. It was carved in the shape of a horse’s head and set with realistic glass eyes. It reminded me of a proud wild stallion. I just had to have the pipe, so I bought it.

In the middle of May, we sailed from San Francisco aboard the Army transport tasker H. Bliss, arriving in Manila, the Philippine Islands, at the end of May. I was eventually assigned to Headquarter’s Squadron, 19th Bomb Group at Clark Field.

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese bombed Clark Field. I was in the noon chow line when the bombing started. When the bombing ceased, I went back to my barracks. A bomb had gone through the roof and had ripped my footlocker apart, scattering the contents all over the floor. My pipe was nowhere to be seen, but I finally located it under my bunk, and not a scratch was on it.

The Japanese had landed on the northern part of the island of Luzon and were rapidly advancing on Clark Field. We evacuated to the Bataan peninsula on Christmas Eve. All I took with me were a few personal effects, clothing, and my horsehead pipe.

Aerial view of the prison camp where Jerman was captive.

I was captured on April 9, l942 and I was liberated in 1945 September. We used to have a saying when things got rough. One guy would say, “Yeah, but they could be a lot worse. They could throw rocks at us and make us work out in the rain.”I was a prisoner of war for forty-two months. In fact, when I was captured I was operating a “net control” station. It was a radio station that controlled a certain sector of the war that we were in. I was stationed in General Edward P. King’s headquarters. General King was in command of that sector. He didn’t have any more food for his troops or any equipment, or arms. Macarthur said, You will fight until the last man. King said, “I’m not just going to put my men out there and have them slaughtered.” So he surrendered and I was in that group.

The day I was captured, that was real strange. We had the net control station for General King, and I’d gone down there. We knew something was up because we used to generate a lot of that information out of our radio stations. We knew something was going on because the day before the surrender, there was a bunch of ammunition boxes around and they blew them up, and all night long you could here the shellcase things and that going overhead and the whistling from blowing them up. So I went down there that morning and there was a Lieutenant and a Japanese enlisted man. He said, “So where did you come from?” and I said, “Oh, well, they brought me in here in a vehicle and they just dropped me off here.” And he said, “No you didn’t, you come from a back up in there.” So he made me go back up there where our radio station was and he followed me up there. The Japanese informed us that we were to destroy everything. So as soon as they left, we tore it all up—blew up the transmitter, the whole thing. It wasn’t worth a darn anymore. Then we realized that the end had come.

It was shortly there after that morning that they lined us up over in groups and started marching us out. That’s when all hell broke loose and we got a good taste of our hospitality. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us. They put us in these groups and started marching us and General King had gone to—I forget who the Japanese commander was that was in there. Anyway, he told them that when he surrendered, one thing that he wanted to ask for was that all of his men would have transportation out of there. He said that they had sufficient vehicles that they could put us on. This Japanese commander that accepted the surrender said that he would abide by that, but they never did that. They started marching us out down the peninsula. That’s when we got a real taste of what living with those dirty bastards was. It wasn’t too good.

1946, Japan. The prison camp barracks where Jerman was imprisoned.

That Bataan Death March was strictly the pits. The thing was the Japanese had come in there, and when we surrendered they were going to make a landing on a place called Corregidor. It was an island and it was highly fortified. They wanted to get us off of the peninsula as quick as possible because we were in the way. The Japanese had never taken prisoners before to any extent. They were kind of bewildered themselves what to do with us, and we would go up a ways and they were supposed to get relief and they wouldn’t. They weren’t feeding us or anything like that. If anything irritated them the first thing they did was either bayonet you or shoot you. So you just plowed along down the road and kept your mouth shut.

I found out that we were in groups of about fifty people and I found out if I get in the center of this, I would be protected. I survived it pretty good. It took about five to six days to get out of there. It was about sixty-five or seventy miles. The thing was, it was so disorganized that it seemed like a long ways. Several thousand men were killed or shot. The only time we got food was maybe every two or three days they would come around with a bucket of steamed rice. You could stick your hand in and whatever you could get in your hand, that was your rations. My diet, it was basically rice. I don’t know how I ever survived it. Lucky, I guess.

After we got up there a ways, they put us in different prison camps. The first one was Camp O’Donnell, which had been a training area for the Filipinos. They were real crude buildings and that’s where they would put us. They had only one little pipe line and one faucet for about five thousand people that they put in there. Your indoor sport was standing in line all day long to try and get a canteen of water. They had a pump and that would run. About half the time you were up there and thought you were going to get some water and the pump would stop. You spent all day there and never got any water. That was a terrible place.

1946, Japan. Prison camp barracks interior, central hall.

You can’t imagine losing your freedom, what it means. It really tears you up, you have someone on you all the time telling you don’t do that, don’t do this, or slapping you around and you don’t have a bit of freedom whatsoever. You belong to them in other words. I wasn’t happy—we will put it that way. They had you under the hammer. You walked a straight and narrow. Most of them were pretty strict; some of them were halfway decent. Most of them weren’t. It all depended on who you were with, but on the average it was work. They had something going for you all the time, stuff they didn’t want to do, and so they figured they had manpower there, they’d use it. Once in a while you’d get some Japanese soldiers that were towards the end there—the old hardcore men were gone—and there were younger Japanese soldiers coming in, and they didn’t want any part of us. They’d have pictures of their family and they’d want to show them to you. They weren’t a bit interested in beating a soldier, and they treated us halfway decent.

It was the old hardcore guy that would slap you around, and just for kicks they would torment you. They had these big troughs they built and they’d wash their clothes in there. Well, one of them got me one day and decided that he was going to have me wash all of his clothes. So I was washing them and I wasn’t too interested. There was about this much water in the space and he stuck my head down there and held it down there. So I decided I’d better do a little better job with his laundry.

They [the Japanese] gave us a card. They said, “I’m well”, “I’m having a great time”, and certain key things you could check. That was the kind of message we were able to send home. My mother heard from me one time, when I was a prisoner. People knew her in Washington D.C., knew her very well. She didn’t leave any stone unturned to get information about her son. That way she got all the information she could. There were a lot of these people that were radio watchers and sometimes the Japanese would send out propaganda speeches that supposedly we would put out, that we are doing well and that we really liked the Japanese and all this bull. They would broadcast all over the airways and these people would intercept them and they would send that to my mother. In all that time, I had about two messages I was able to send home and it was one of these stock things where you just checked off “I’m well, and being well taken care of” or “They are feeding me well” and all this bull that was a propaganda type of thing. They were sparse. The only thing is that when my mother would get them at least she knew that I was alive. But they didn’t tell her anything, and if anytime you said “The heck with you people I’m going to add a few things in there that I don’t like, like, “They’re beating me up everyday,” or something like that, it would never get through. So the best thing to do is to follow their rigmarole and put a little check on the good stuff on these cards and at least they would get to my mother. I have a bunch of those at home.

Something I could never get used to is these community baths. You go in there and there are men and women in there and you go in there and a lot of men would point at your privates.

They asked for volunteer people that were communication people and I put my name in and luckily I was chosen one of fifteen. Really I think that saved my life because I got out of that can.

A friend, Joe, who had been able to get some tobacco leaves, asked to borrow my pipe while I was on this work detail. I consented, with the stipulation that I wanted it back when we met up again.

My work detail went to Balanga, south of Camp O’ Donnell on the Bataan peninsula. The Japanese mission was to recover equipment abandoned by the U.S. when Bataan surrendered. The Japanese had heavy artillery batteries set up on Bataan, firing on Corregidor in preparation for making a landing. This prevented us from doing any equipment recovery. We left Balanga after two weeks and went to Ft. McKinley. The Japanese unit we were with treated us rather well. They were communications personnel, not hardcore soldiers like in Bataan. Our duties for the most part were loading and hauling 50 gallon drums of motor fuel. Everything went well for several months until two men escaped. Then all hell broke loose. The Japanese lined us up against a building so we were facing 13 soldiers with rifles. It seemed certain that we would meet our maker before a firing squad. Our guardian angel must have been with us, for a Japanese lieutenant came by and chewed out the sergeant in charge because he wasn’t searching for the escaped prisoners. The guards marched us back to our barracks and interrogated us all hours of the day and night for several days. The Japanese never got the information they were hoping for about the escapees.

Next, we were sent to Cabanatuan POW camp. I was put to work on the camp farm. A friend of mine, Glen Wayman, a cook in one of the camp kitchens, was instrumental in getting me a job in the kitchen as a fireman. He told me that Joe, the fellow to whom I had loaned the horsehead pipe, had died at Camp O’Donnell.

A few months later, in late 1943, while I was working in the kitchen, a captain came by to get a light and to my surprise he had my horsehead pipe. His explanation as to how he had come by the pipe in Camp O’Donnell seemed fishy. I described the history of the pipe and told him that I’d like to work out a deal to get it back. He accepted a trade for the pipe that I had made; the horsehead pipe was once again mine.

In the middle of July, 1944, I was sent with a group from Cabanatuan Prison Camp to Bilibid Prison in Manila. This was a prisoner of war staging area. A group of 1,500 of us were marched from the camp to a pier on Manila Bay where we were crammed into the forward hold of a Japanese freighter, the Nishi Maru. It was sitting room only, and our few possessions were thrown into the hold below us. Once again, I was separated from my horsehead pipe. We laid in the bay for two days before sailing. They had covered the hatches, so there was virtually no circulation of air, and the heat was horrific. Some men went out of their minds, while others died of suffocation. The Japanese finally uncovered the hatches when we set sail, but the trip was still a living hell.

Jerman made a case befitting the horsehead pipe and displays it proudly with his most cherished positions.We eventually reached Moji, on the island of Kyushu, Japan, sometime in early August, 1944. We were not permitted to retrieve our belongings when we disembarked from the ship, and so my pipe was lost once again. The Japanese divided us into groups of 100. My group eventually wound up in Fukuoka Camp No. 3 situated near the town of Tobata. I was put to work in the Yawata Steel Works in Di Ni Yoyo Cemento Section, breaking out slag and loading it into small ore cars. The slag was then crushed and used as an additive in making cement. I worked there until a Japanese guard, who felt I was taking too long to secure a loose wheel to an ore car, struck me in the left hand with an iron bar. My injured finger became severely infected. The Japanese put me on light duty, operating a honey bucket to fertilize gardens outside the camp.

Starting in May, 1945, B- 29 aircraft raids on the steel mill were becoming more and more common. In the middle of August, 1945, the camp commander, Major Yaichi Rikitake, called a meeting of the whole camp. He informed us that Japan, Great Britain and the United States had decided to stop fighting and that the war was over. We were warned not to leave camp, since it was unknown how the surrounding population would treat us. This did not stop us from exercising our new-found freedom. My friend, Jack Tussing, and I took several trips on the electric trains, checking out the local country. B- 29 aircrafts were dropping food, clothing, and medical supplies to us nearly every day.

Carl Plemons, a friend of mine from a neighboring camp, came by to find out which of his friends were still alive. He said that a fellow in his camp named Frenchy had a horsehead pipe like the one that I used to have. I couldn’t imagine how it could be mine. After all, it had been a year since I threw it into the hold of the Nishi Maru. The next day, I accompanied Carl back to his camp to check on the pipe. I found Frenchy, and much to my surprise, he had my elusive pipe. I told him about the pipe’s convoluted history and that somehow I’d like to get it back. He asked me to give him a day to decide what to do with the pipe. Frenchy’s sense of fairness prevailed and once again my pipe was back in my possession.

After a screening at Letterman General Hospital, I was assigned to a General Hospital in Van Nuys, California. I was given a two weeks convalescent leave to go to my home in Bisbee, Arizona. My mode of transportation was by civilian train, which was very crowded with discharged military personnel going home. I had an Air Force B-4 bag, which I set in the aisle. My horsehead pipe was in the bag, and sometime during the trip one of its ears broke. How ironic. Without a scratch, the pipe had survived all the trials of war over the course of 42 months. I was able to repair the pipe at a later date with a piece of brier taken from another pipe. I made a case befitting the pipe, and it now rests in a place of honor in a curio cabinet.