|
By Al Zdon
Tony Cichy will turn 95 this month. He lives by himself on a lake near Dent in northwestern Minnesota.
He keeps house, plows the driveway, and now
and then he allows himself to be roped into one more interview about his days in the service during World War II.
Reporters and writers are curious about Cichy's story because it involves the Bataan
Death March, being a prisoner of war in the Philippines for over two and half years, and being one of only eight survivors of 1,800 Americans aboard a torpedoed Japanese "hell boat" in late 1944. Oh, and
then there's the frantic 600-mile journey of escape across China.
It's a heck of a story, but Cichy says this will be the very last time he's going to tell it. Enough is enough, he said.
So, if
this is the very last time, let's get on with it and do it right.
--------------
Anton Cichy was born February 18, 1914, in Urbank, Minnesota, a small community just west of Parker's
Prairie. He was the second oldest of the seven children of John and Amelia Cichy.
His dad was a well driller and Anton followed him into the business when he was nine years old.
"I
didn't mind the work, but I missed all that schooling. I only went through seventh and eighth grade and I missed most of that."
Cichy said his parents would request that he be excused for the first
two months of school in the fall and the last two months of school in the spring so he could work in the family business. "They allowed you to do that in those days."
The Depression years were tough,
and when the drilling business wasn't providing, the members of the family did what they had to do to put food on the table.
"I was netting tullibees through the ice one winter on Star Lake. You could
net them and then sell them for flour or groceries so that we could eat."
Nearby two other fellows were also netting, but when two stout looking figures appeared, walking out on the lake, the two
other fishermen began to leave. As they passed Cichy, they threw a very large northern pike in his direction.
"Now, you have to understand that you can net tullibees. That's legal. But it's against
the law to net northerns. I knew better than to net a northern and keep it.
"But when I looked up, these two game wardens were right on top of me. I tried to kick the fish under the ice, but it was
too late. They drew their guns, and I couldn't do anything."
The judge didn't believe Cichy's story, and sentenced him to a $100 fine or 90 days in jail. In late 1940, that was no choice at all for
Cichy.
"I went into jail on Dec. 13. I had caught 13 tullibees that day. They let me out of jail on March 13, and that was the same day I was notified of the draft."
Cichy joined the 194th Tank
Battalion out of Minnesota, and went to train for five months at Ft. Lewis, Washington. After a 17-day ocean trip, the unit arrived in the Philippines, just in time for World War II to commence.
"We
were kind of expecting it. We had been on alert for some time. When we came over, there were no lights on the ship, a total blackout. We had even dug a trench to dive into in case we were bombed."
On
Dec. 8, the Japanese air force bombed the Americans' positions near Nichols Field and Clark Field.
"I took off running and headed for the trench, but when I got there it was already full. There were
bombs going off in front of me and behind me, and they were strafing. I looked up and I could see the whites of the Japs' eyes, they were so close. Bullets were hitting alongside me, but I dove under a
tank.
"Our pilots were sitting out in their planes on the field waiting for orders, but no orders came. The Japanese blew up the planes as they sat there."
When the assault was over, Cichy went
back to his barracks but got a big surprise. "It was gone. A bomb had landed right in the middle of it. You know those bombs were loaded with scrap metal that the U.S. had sold Japan. Those bombs were
made of old Model-Ts and American ball bearings."
It was the start of a long, slow miserable retreat for the 194th and the other American units in the area.
"We would fight them off as much as we
could, but they were too damn tough and we'd have to retreat. We retreated all the way to Bataan, and then we had our backs against the ocean."
Food and ammunition were running out, and reinforcements
were not coming. "In the end, we had to surrender. Otherwise, they would have killed us all. I had already lost a lot of friends."
The men were rounded up by the Japanese and forced to sit in a field
waiting for several days while the Japanese Army got ready to march them off. "There was no food or water, and we hadn't had much before we surrendered. The Japanese had cut off our supply lines. We had
to just sit in the hot sun.
"When the Japanese were ready, the death march started."
The men were marched four abreast through the jungle. "It was bad, very bad. We had to march all day. There were
quite a few flowing wells along the way, but we were told not to break ranks. Some guys couldn't stand it. They went for the water and the Japs, who had machine guns, just mowed them down. I didn't try
it myself."
Cichy says he's not sure how long the march lasted, but he's been told it was seven days. "I was so damned weak already. I'd had nothing to eat, and they only fed us once on the march.
When I went by to get my food, I held up my mess kit and the cook dishing out the chow missed and the food went into the dirt. That was it for my meal."
Eventually the men reached a place where they
could be jammed into boxcars to finish the journey. "It was so hot in there, it was unbelievable. And we were crammed in so close that you couldn't fall down if you wanted to. Luckily I was in a corner,
and I was able to put my nose up to a hole and get some air. A lot of guys died in that boxcar."
The train dropped them off near their final destination, Camp O'Donnell. "The Filipinos lined up and
asked the Japanese permission to feed us. That was a life saver."
Inside the camp, the American and Filipino prisoners were given a welcoming talk by a Japanese office who spoke perfect English. "He
said, 'You are our enemies. All we want to know every morning is how many are dead and how many are living.' That's all he said."
Cichy came down with a serious case of malaria. "It hit me every day
at 11 a.m. At first I'd be so cold that it didn't matter how many blankets they wrapped around me. An hour later I was burning up. It knocked you for a loop."
Finally Cichy was able to trade a few
cigarette butts he found, tossed by the Japanese guards, for some quinine. "That helped me out."
The day to day regimen in the camp settled into a constant battle for survival. Most of the prisoners
only had their mess kit, a blanket and a canteen.
"Guys were really dying. There weren't enough well ones to do the burial details."
Cichy was assigned one day to carry a dead soldier to the
graveyard, a couple of miles away, on a plywood sheet. The dead man's body was bloated, stinking and dripping fluids onto Cichy as he carried him. "I had two miles of that, and then when we got there, we
had to dig the grave."
Cichy tried to stay away from the burial details after that, but it often wasn't a choice. "When they called, you'd better go or they'd kill you. I saw a lot of killings. God, I
saw a lot."
The guards' main weapon in the camp was a pick handle, a piece of lumber about four feet long. "One hit on the head, and your brains were out. Or if they hit you on the arm, they'd break
it. Then the gangrene would set in and you'd die anyway."
How did a well driller's son from Northern Minnesota survive in this hell?
"I was always looking for food, always. In the rainy season, you
could find night crawlers. They were the best. They gave you strength. I ate a lot of grass. I ate the leaves off the trees. The Japanese officers would try to raise sweet potatoes, and at night
I'd crawl through the dark on my belly into those little gardens and eat."
The Japanese would take the prisoners out on work details. "One time, I saw a Jap cleaning a fish. He just left the guts and
the fish head. I broke ranks, and in those days I had pretty good teeth. I ate everything raw including that head. That really tasted good."
On one detail, the men were being taken to a workplace in
trucks. "There were little kids in the huts along the way, and they peeked out at us and gave us the victory sign with their fingers. The Japanese driver hit the brakes so hard we almost went flying over
the cab. They went in those houses and dragged the kids out and chopped their fingers off."
One of jobs the men had was to fill old 55 gallon drums with water and logging chains and then roll them
around the field to clean out the inside of the barrels. When the drums were clean, they were filled with gasoline and loaded onto boxcars.
"It was all we could do to roll the drums up the ramp into
the boxcar. There were two guys inside who had to stack them end on end. I don't know how they did it, except that you can do almost anything when there's a Jap with a bayonet behind you."
Cichy said
he was so busy surviving, the time actually went fairly fast in the camp. Still he suffered from most of the diseases going around. "Guys had malaria, of course, and our diet was so poor that most guys
had beriberi, and many guys had tuberculosis.
"I had the wet beriberi, where your legs swell up, and then they just burst open on top."
Cichy was eventually moved, with many other prisoners, to
another prisoner of war camp at Cabanatuan. The work there was to create a massive garden for the Japanese troops.
"Of course, we were not allowed to eat any of it. We were allowed to take the weeds
into camp and boil them. That just gave us more diarrhea, and we already had that to start with. There were times when we were hoeing, though, and if the Japanese guard looked the other
way…
"Once I had a mouthful of turnip and the guard started walking toward me. I didn't even dare to chew. I just swallowed it whole."
After a stint at Cabanatuan, prisoners were shipped to
Bilibid Prison in Manila. "The Japanese just let all the other prisoners out and put us in there. We might have been there three or four months."
The Japanese plan at that point of the war to was to
take the Americans to other places where their labor could be more valuable. It seemed clear that the U.S. forces were poised to recapture the Philippines. Many prisoners were taken to Japan, and others
were taken to work in the coal mines in Manchuria.
Over 1,800 men were loaded on the Arisan Maru, a large Japanese freighter, that left Manila on Oct. 10. These ships became known as "hell ships" both
because of the intolerable conditions on board, and because of their deadly fate due to Allied attacks on Japanese shipping.
"We were down in the hold. There were no lights, and it was very dark. I
think we got fed once, two little balls of rice. There were no toilet facilities, just a five gallon can that quickly ran over with diarrhea.
"You had to feel your way among the dead in the dark. The
smell was terrible."
The Arisan Maru was at sea for 14 days in a convoy of 13 ships when it was discovered by two American submarines in the South China Sea.
"You could hear the torpedoes coming.
The first one missed the front of the ship, and the second one missed the back. The third one got us square in the middle. It broke the ship in half."
At first it looked like the men would be trapped.
"But then a hatch cover opened up above our heads and the light came in. There was a ladder that we could climb up."
The ship's crew and guards quickly abandoned the Arisan Maru and swam to nearby
ships. When the American POWS tried to join them, they were not allowed to board.
Cichy, like many others, quickly made his way to the ship's kitchen. "I filled up on rice and fish. I knew the ship
was going down and I knew I was going to die.
"Then I found a sack of brown sugar. I filled up my canteen cup and ate the whole thing. That was a big mistake. I threw up the whole thing. I was
throwing up green."
Many of the prisoners got into the ocean, but in their weakened condition they could not battle the high seas caused by a typhoon.
The ever-resourceful Cichy took empty
canteens that he found and attached them to his arms and legs, making himself floatable. He was able to see the fate of his comrades that reached the other ships. "They tried to get up the rope ladders,
and the crew had long poles and poked them off. They poked them in the eyes. They wouldn't rescue them. I was going to swim over there too until I saw that."
In the end, with the ship slowly sinking,
Cichy simply walked into the water and began swimming. He rode the high waves for about five hours until it got dark.
"You know how when the moon hits the water, you can see this moonlit path? I
looked and there was a boat in the moonlight. There was a guy in the boat, and he was yelling for me to swim for it."
Cichy began to swim toward the boat. "I was almost there, I could almost touch it,
but I was all played out. It was very windy and the waves were very high. I drifted away.
"It tried again several times, but I couldn't reach it. Then I found a board in the water, maybe a foot wide
by five feet long. I laid my body on it, and it helped me to get to the boat. When I got there, somebody grabbed my wrists and pulled me aboard. I passed out."
The man who had pulled him aboard was
Lt. Robert Overbeck from Maryland, who was also a prisoner on the Arisan Maru. The boat was actually a life boat from the freighter that had popped loose when the ship went down.
Also on board was
Pvt. Avery Wilber from Wisconsin. At dawn the contingent became five when Sgt. Don Meyer of California and Pvt. Calvin Graef of New Mexico, who were swimming on boards and other flotsom, were also
rescued.
The men were in a life boat that was nearly full of sea water, probably several hundred miles from any land. But this is where the miracles started to happen.
"There was this thudding
against the side of the boat. We leaned over to look, and it was a long pole. It turned out that it was the mast for the boat. We pulled that in. A little while later, there was more thudding on the
side, and we pulled in a crate. It was the sail for the boat."
As time went on, the men were able to rescue two four-gallon kegs of water that floated by. They found a large pail and were slowly able
to get the sea water out of the boat. And they found a quantity of hardtack stored in the bow of the boat.
"It just about broke your teeth to eat it, but it would dissolve in your mouth."
The men
worked to get the mast up, and were finally able to do so. It was designed to be held in place by a rusty bolt that wouldn't give. The men kept applying seawater and were finally able to get it to move a
little, and then a little more.
"We were so happy to get the mast up, but then we discovered that we hadn't run a rope through the pulley at the top." One of the men had to shinny up the mast to
attach the rope.
Just as they were getting ready to put up the sail, a Japanese destroyer came roaring up on them. "It came up really close, and there was one guy with glasses looking down. He called
for two guys with machine guns. I just laid sideways by the side of the boat and stayed still. When we looked again, the destroyer was pulling away."
When the enemy ship was out of sight, the little
crew hoisted the sail, and tried to make a course due west, where they assumed China would be. They took turns on the boat's rudder.
It took three days and three nights before they spotted land. They
also spotted a Chinese fishing boat and took a chance.
"There were eight Chinese fishermen aboard, big husky guys. We had quite a time trying to explain to them who we were, where we'd been and all of
that. You've got to understand that all we were wearing was g-strings."
The Chinese finally understood their story, and they fed them a hot meal. "It was the first good meal I'd had in three years.
They steamed up a gallon of rice and each of us got a red snapper to eat."
The fishing boat took them to shore. "They gave us Chinese clothes, and they told us that the Japanese came around pretty
regularly. The local people were crawling over each other just to see us."
The next morning, the five free men were on their way inland. "There were no bridges over the rivers, just ropes where they
could pull a small boat across. We walked 30 miles that day, and that was it for my feet. We didn't have shoes, and my feet were all blisters. I couldn't move any more."
For the next day's journey,
the men were put in sedan chairs and carried further inland. "The funny thing is that the day before it took us all of the daylight hours to walk that 30 miles. They next day, with them carrying us, it
only took half a day to go thirty miles."
On the second day, a Chinese government official gave the men $2,000 each in Chinese money. They immediately spent $700 of it to have a pair of shoes made.
Cichy still has those shoes.
"We had on big Chinese hats and Chinese clothing. We looked Chinese. We heard that the Japs were really looking for us. That night we had a big feast, a 17-course dinner,
with wine."
The next day's journey of about 150 miles was done on a bicycle built for five. "We'd be going down this path, about 12 inches wide, with a 1,000 foot drop on one side and a thousand foot
drop on the other side. I just closed my eyes."
The next day, the men were loaded on trucks that burned charcoal and taken about 60 miles further. The following day, the trucks burned camphor, and
another 60 miles were accomplished. Finally, the little group reached a Chinese Army outpost that had 14 Americans stationed in the camp.
"We stayed there two weeks, just eating and trying to gain
weight. I probably weighed 80 lbs. when we arrived in China."
A small cargo plane arrived after two weeks. "There were two young American pilots, and they were scared to death. Some Japanese fighters
had come after them on the way in. On our way out, they flew way above the clouds, and we never saw any enemy planes."
The five escapees were now at a large Army base, and again they were treated to
as much food as they wanted. Cichy said he gained about 40 lbs. before he left China.
A big cargo plane, probably a C-47, took them over the hump into India. Leaving Calcutta, Cichy looked out a port
hole in the plane and saw that one of the engines was barely turning. And then it stopped.
"I thought, 'Holy cripes, I've made it through all of this, and now I'm going to die.' But the pilot brought
the plane back to the airfield and landed sideways. One of the wings hit the pavement, but we made it. That was a close one."
Then it was across Africa to Morocco, and finally a long flight to New
York. As soon as they arrived in the United States, they were immediately sent to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Cichy and his comrades were some of the first American prisoners to be freed from
Japanese control during the war, and the military minds wanted to know everything – included the location of mines in Manila Harbor. The men spent nine days in intense interrogation, although the
evenings were free to enjoy the night spots of the nation's capital.
(Three other POWs on the Arisan Maru also survived, but were recaptured and stayed as prisoners of the Japanese until the end of
the war.)
Finally it was time to go home. "They asked me if I wanted to guard Japanese prisoners. I said, "You mean with a gun?" They said yes. I said, "With live ammo?" They said yes. I told them if
they did that they wouldn't have any prisoners left. They decided maybe that wasn't such a good idea."
Cichy came home to Minnesota in early 1945, but was still in the Army. His job was to tend the
golf course at Ft. Snelling. He was eager to get out, but the war was dragging on.
"I was mowing greens and trapping gophers. One day the sergeant came over and I asked him when he thought I'd get my
discharge. He told me that I was doing such a good job, they would probably keep me in the Army until the golf season was over.
"I didn't have to take that."
Cichy calmly started the mower, put it
in gear, pushed the throttle wide open, and aimed it for the cliff overlooking the river about 50 feet away. "I thought he might run after it and try to shut it off, but he didn't. It just went off the
cliff and down to the river."
"I never heard nothing about it. On July 25th, I got my discharge papers."
Cichy went back to well drilling and got married in 1946. He and his wife, Amelia, had three
children. She died some years ago, and Cichy's second wife, Eleanor, also died a few years back.
His experience of war never left him. "I've got that PTSD. It did something to my brain. I had the
shakes for about 20 years. I've never gotten over the dysentery. It finally ruined my large intestine. I can only sleep about three hours a night, and then I'm tired all day long. Last night I didn't
sleep at all."
His five comrades also had a long-term reaction to the war in one form or another, Cichy said. "Calvin Graef had a furniture store in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but he was angry all the
time. He'd take it out on the customers, and pretty soon he didn't have any customers. The VA finally gave him a disability."
Cichy fought the VA over his own claims for many years before finally
getting a disability rating. He retired from well drilling many years ago.
"When I do sleep I get these nightmares. If I take a nap in the afternoon, I'll dream that someone has got me by the ankle
and won't let go. It's hard to get loose. At night I dream that someone is tapping me.
"But, you know what, I can live with it."
|
