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By Al Zdon
During the Depression years, there were several tough neighborhoods in St. Paul: Rice Street, Payne Avenue, Dale Street just to name a few.
Harold
"Snuff" Kurvers grew up at Western and Burgess, and thus was one of the denizens of the Rice Street society. It was a geographic area where a young man had to use his fists early and often.
"I was
eight years old before I knew I had fingers on my hands," Kurvers joked. "It was a good neighborhood, but a little bit rough."
Kurvers' mother died when he was an infant, and his father raised the
family while working in the freight house for the Great Northern Railroad. The father was Dutch and Luxembourgian and Kurvers spoke Luxembourg, a variation of German, until he went to school.
The
name "Snuff" came from a n'er-do-well uncle who enjoyed chewing tobacco. Harold became "Little Snuff" and then just "Snuff." "There wasn't anybody around Rice Street who didn't have a nickname. My father
didn't like me being called 'Snuff.' "
Kurvers went to St. Bernard's for grade school and then to Washington High School. He broke his leg in his sophomore year, and when school authorities wanted him
to take classwork over, he rebelled and ended his formal education.
"There's school smarts and street smarts, and I knew plenty of guys who were smart but didn't have that much education."
Baseball
was Kurvers' true love. He was a second baseman who played for several city teams and his Legion team. "My only problem was that I lacked confidence. When they picked me for the team, I always thought
they made a mistake."
His shy disposition also carried over into his social life. "I don't think I went out on a date until I was 20." Even with his buddies, he was reserved. "If they started screwing
around in church, I just left them. I wasn't holier than thou, but I have a reverence for what's there."
In the late 30s, Kurvers played ball and found work where he could. His dad urged him to
try professional baseball, and Kurvers was asked to try out for a minor league team. In early 1941, though, he finally landed a good job in the same freight house where his dad worked. The job was
short-lived, however, when Kurvers got his greetings from his Uncle Sam.
"I went in the Army on April 14, 1941. There was a popular song out then and the lyric was, 'Goodbye, dear. I'll be back in a
year.' One year later I was in the hands of the Japanese."
Basic training was at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Kurvers was assigned to the 194th Tank Battalion. The battalion was made up in equal thirds
of men from Minnesota, men from Salinas, California, and men from St. Joseph, Missouri. A large part of the Minnesota contingent was from a National Guard unit in Brainerd.
Kurvers said he never had a
clue that a war was coming on. "Nobody knew except the Japs. They knew what they were going to do. Maybe our Army brass knew that war was coming, but not us monkeys. When I found out I was going to the
Philippines, I joked that I was going south for the winter."
The men were at Fort Lewis from April through September, but Kurvers said the training was minimal. "And then when we got to the
Philippines, it was too damn hot so there was no training there either."
Along the way, Kurvers was assigned to a medical detachment which he didn't like. "But they told me that to get out of it, I'd
have to re-enlist for three years. I told them, 'No way.' "
His main job was to drive ambulances and trucks, bringing medical supplies, food and other material to the front lines. "I never got much
medical training. There was no way I was going to be bandaging anybody."
The trip to the Philippines took 29 days on the SS President Coolidge, a former luxury ocean liner. The ship stopped in Hawaii
and the men were given a 12-hour pass to enjoy themselves.
Kurvers said the U.S. Army in the Philippines was woefully unready for any kind of war. "We were a tank battalion and the tanks were not made
for the conditions in the Philippines. They couldn't move around. They were just standing targets."
The 194th was led by Col. Ernest Miller. "We couldn't stand him because he was so GI. But the day
that war broke out, we all fell in love with him."
The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, about 3 a.m. on Dec. 8 in the Filipino time zone, the soldiers heard about it immediately. There were rumors that
the Philippines would be invaded. "I remember one of my buddies saying, 'The little bastards wouldn't dare touch us.'"
The 194th was sent out from its barracks to encircle Clark Airfield, the major
Army air base in the Philippines. "The only weapon I had was my .45 pistol. But I ended up firing that thing, though I don't know why."
The Japanese landed a major invasion force at Lingayen Gulf and
advanced south toward the U.S. positions. American efforts to stop the invasion were futile. The Japanese began to bomb the U.S. perimeter around the airfield heavily.
"There was this one guy, he had
four years of college, and the bombs were coming down and he just kept standing there. The rest of us were yelling at him to get down, get down. Finally, he hit the deck. I remember thinking, 'I guess
going to school isn't everything.'"
Kurvers and the others never returned to their barracks. "I lost everything that day except what I had on my back. I just kept driving the trucks and ambulance up
to the lines all day."
As the battle proceeded, and the Americans fell back, Kurvers came down with a bad case of what was diagnosed as dengue fever, although now he wonders if it wasn't malaria. "I
was miserable. It even hurt to move my eyes. Everything hurt. You'd put seven blankets over yourself and shake the top one off."
Kurvers was in a hospital in Manila, but as the U.S. troops retreated
back down the Bataan Peninsula, he was released from the hospital and assigned to an infantry unit. "I said, whoa, I don't want this.'" A few days later, though, he found his old unit and was back to
driving trucks.
He remembers that the civilians along the route were very hostile, unlike most Filipinos who were kind to the Americans. "They just hated us. They spit on us. I suppose they were going
through hell too, and they blamed it on us. Later on, when we were on the march, we encountered the other kind of Filipinos. They would risk a beating just to bring us fruit."
The Allies held out for
three months. "We were hungry all the time. They were bombing us all the time. I saw guys who would kill a monkey to eat, but I just couldn't handle that."
"Finally word came that we had surrendered.
I don't remember getting any other orders. It's hell just to be sitting there. You don't know what's going on or what to do." Some Americans took off for the hills and jungle. Kurvers doesn't know what
became of them, though he heard later that some had survived by hiding out with the resistance.
Two days later, the Japanese Army arrived. "One of the Nips came walking through, and he indicated he
wanted my watch. He showed me he already had three or four on each arm. I showed him that I didn't have one. But then he spotted my ring and he took it right off my hand. My girlfriend had given it to
me."
The march began on April 11. The Japanese marched the 75,000 Americans and Filipinos 60 miles back up the Bataan Peninsula. By the time the march was complete, as many as 10,000 had died.
"It
wasn't so much the march itself, but that we were in such bad shape before it began. I saw a lot of bodies, but I never saw anybody killed. I saw one body that was completely black. I don't know how that
happened.
"I saw a lot of beatings. My Rice Street training took over, and I learned to march on the inside where the Japanese guards couldn't reach you."
Another trick the marchers learned was
when they were passing another group that was resting to join that group when the guards weren't looking.
And despite the horror of the march, Kurvers said there still was some humor. "These two guys
I knew were marching, and one of them was from Texas and proud of it. The other guy said, 'You, know I'd rather be on this hike than spend any time in Texas.'"
The march took five or six days with
little food or water. On the last day, Kurvers was through.
"My back was killing me. It was really hurting. I just told them to go on without me. They said, 'Snuff, get going.' I said, 'I just can't
do it anymore.' They said, 'Snuff, they're going to shoot you.' And I said, 'Then just let them shoot me.' "
Two of his friends picked him up and started down the trail. Kurvers had an arm around each
of his comrades' shoulders. In this way, Kurvers made it to Camp O'Donnell, a former Air Corps base turned into an internment camp by the Japanese.
"What I've always felt bad about was that one of the
guys who helped me, Harry Heikkila from Duluth, died soon after we got into camp."
The end of the march brought little relief. "It was just a mess, bodies laying all over the place. I think there were
40 or 50 dying every day at O'Donnell. Every day I'd go down and look at the bodies to see if any of our guys had died."
The prisoners got a watery rice dish in the morning and a little more
substantial rice portion in the evening. "But it was full of worms wriggling around. It was better to eat it early in the morning before you could see what you were eating. And you had to keep an eye on
your food. If you turned around to talk to somebody, it would be gone. Your buddies had taken it – survival of the fittest."
Kurvers said it was hard to figure out why some men lived and others
died. "There were guys who said they weren't going to make it, and they didn't. But I remember one guy who was full of life, and he was talking about what he would get for Christmas that year. He died
the next day. It's hard to get inside somebody's mind."
Over 2,000 Americans and 27,000 Filipinos died at O'Donnell, but fortunately for Kurvers, he wasn't there very long. After about four weeks, he
was loaded on a very crowded train and taken to Cabanatuan Camp.
Kurvers was at the camp from June 1942 until September 1944, and while conditions were harsh, they were nothing like what had
transpired on Bataan or at Camp O'Donnell. In fact, during one period of about nine months, the Japanese allowed the American prisoners to deal directly with local farmers and get as much rice as they
wanted.
"We really loaded up. It was a good time. But, you know, we were still hungry. It was like your system was calling for something else besides rice."
Beriberi, a vitamin deficiency caused
by lack of thiamine, was common among the prisoners. Kurvers had it in his hands, and they swelled and became super sensitive. His bunkmate had it in his feet. "If I just brushed the mosquito netting
over his feet, he would howl with pain."
Kurvers lucked out from the beginning at Cabanatuan. "When I got there, they put me in the kitchen. It really helped me survive. In fact, I was getting enough
rice that I would take my ration over to this Jewish kid, Joe Snyder from Los Angeles, who was in a hospital hut. He had cracked up. I had what I needed, so he got mine.
"When we had been out on the
lines in a foxhole and getting the hell beat out of us, Joe had asked me to say the Lord's Prayer with him, and we did. There are no atheists in foxholes. But when we got to Cabanatuan, he just went
bananas. He was belligerent a lot of the time. And then other times he'd be laughing at nothing."
Kurver's "vacation" at Cabanatuan ended when they moved a group of prisoners to the Bilibid Prison in
Manila. They were there to wait for a ship that would take them to Japan for slave labor. The ships that transported the prisoners were collectively known as hell ships because of the conditions on board
and because they had a tendency to be sunk by Allied attacks.
Kurvers stayed at Bilibid Prison from September through November, 1944, and his major memory of the sojourn was being hungry. The next
stage of his journey was what he now calls "the worst 49 days of my life."
On Dec. 13, 1944, a total of 1,620 American POWs were put aboard the Oryoku Maru and sealed up in the large ship's holds.
"There were three holds on the ship, and we thought ours was the worst. But after I talked with other guys, I came to realize the other two holds were worse. They even had more people crammed
together.
"I can't explain what it was like in there. You have to live through it. There was a lot of screaming, hollering, crying. I might have been doing some of that. I can tell you that I would
lick the sides of the ship for moisture. We would get a mess kit of rice for four men, twice a day. We'd get six spoonfuls of water a day. We would just crave water."
As the Oryoku Maru neared the
naval base in Subic Bay in the Philippines, bombers from the USS Hornet attacked the unmarked ship. "A bomb hit the after hold. I think about 200 Americans were killed right away."
In all, about 300
Americans were killed on the Oryoku Maru.
The ship began to sink in the bay. "It was going down when I finally got up on deck. I had never learned to swim, so I found a couple of empty canteens and
strapped them to my belt. I thought they'd give me some buoyancy. But I remember standing on that deck looking out at how far I'd have to go to get to shore, and I said aloud to myself, 'Snuff, why
baseball? Why not swimming?'"
The ship was only about 300 yards from shore. "But it looked like ten miles as far as I was concerned. I jumped in the water and flailed my way over to some debris and
several of us rode it into shore. When I got to the beach, I looked down and both my canteens were gone. They must have come off when I hit the water. It's a good thing I didn't know that, or I would
have drowned."
About 1,200 men spent the next few days locked up in a tennis court in the city of Ologapo. "I remember we had plenty of water because there was a spigot there. But it was just packed
in there, and it was cold at night. All I had was a shirt and my GI pants.
Finally, about 200 of the prisoners, including Kurvers, were loaded in the hold of the Brazil Maru and taken across the
strait to Formosa. They were then put aboard Enoura Maru, another hell ship.
"This was my third ship. I ran into a buddy, Tony Falleta. They were going to put us in separate holds, but I told Tony
that the Japs didn't know who any of us were and he should just come with us into our hold.
"Later on, the guns started going off, and Tony asked me what the hell was going on. I told him not to
worry, because this was Formosa, and it was a secure port, and they were only doing target practice."
A while later, Kurvers was enjoying a bowl of rice that had been doled out, when a huge explosion
rocked the ship. "I went down on my knees, trying to hold on to my rice. Suddenly there was a clap on my shoulder and there was Tony. He said, 'Just practice? Why you son of a bitch.'"
The ship was
severely damaged, but the men stayed aboard for several days. "There was a practice that when someone died, the prisoners would take his stuff. He didn't need it anymore. I could see this one prisoner
was dying, and he had a good jacket. I was lying next to him when he died. I reached over and I could feel the rigor mortis setting it. I thought I'd try to get that jacket. I tried to get it off him,
but I just couldn't do it.
"Suddenly, Tony jumped over me and grabbed the jacket off that guy, He threw it at me and said, 'Here, you chicken-hearted SOB.' "
The prisoners knew the ship had been
crippled in the port because there was a strong list to one side. About 350 had died in the short time aboard the Enoura Maru.
Not long after, they were put aboard the Brazil Maru again. It was
Kurver's fourth attempt to get across to Japan.
Again, the conditions were lethal. Kurvers' strongest memory is that of a Catholic priest who would talk to the men. "When he started talking, the
silence just radiated away from him until the whole ship was quiet. He didn't just pray, but he said things like, 'Don't worry, we're going to make it.' And, 'Hang in there.' And then he'd always end by
saying the Lord's Prayer, and everybody would pray together."
One day, Father Cummings was so weak, that other prisoners had to support him when he spoke. "But as usual, there was total silence. We
just listened. And when he got to the Lord's Prayer, he died."
The men got off the ship when it reached Japan on January 29, and one of Kurvers' friends came up to him. "He said, 'Snuff, did you
notice the eyes of the guys getting out of the ship. Are mine like that?' I asked him if mine were like that too. These guys could walk and talk, but their eyes were a hundred miles away. We were in
rough shape when we got off that boat."
Just in the passage over, some 450 of the 900 POWs had died on the Brazil Maru. Of the the 1,620 who had boarded the Oryoku Maru six weeks earlier, 403 lived to
the end of the war.
On the pier, the starving and completely dehydrated prisoners were treated to a barrel of water before they were put on a train to the camp. "When we got off the train, I looked
back. We had been sitting three abreast on the seats, and there were three puddles there. None of us could control ourselves."
When Kurvers got to the camp, he immediately went into the hospital.
"Everything was running out of me. Everything. They were finally able to stop that, and then for five days I went without a bowel movement. When I finally did have a movement, it was like giving birth to
a child."
The group had arrived at Fukuoka 17. The camp was located in Omuto on the same bay as the major city of Nagasaki, but about 60 miles away. Kurvers recovered enough by April to rejoin his
mates in the Mitsui-Miike Tankuo Coal Mine, the reason for the camp.
Each day began at 4 a.m. and the men were given two parcels of rice, one to eat then and one for lunch. "But after a while,
everybody just ate both meals right then because at the mine you'd come up for lunch and your food would be gone."
The men would march two and one-half miles to the mine, work a 12-hour shift, and
then march the same distance back to the barracks. The work was hard and the mines hot. The prisoners wore only loin cloths.
Kurvers remembers women in the mine, handing out tools. "They were civil
to us, but no hugs or kisses." His friends told him that in another part of the mine, the women worked bare chested, a Japanese tradition. "But in the shape we were in, a bare breast meant about as much
as a tree."
Like the other camps he was in, Kurvers said the quality of treatment varied greatly. Some guards were decent, while others had a strong leaning toward cruelty. Kurvers had a theory, never
proven, that the good guards were Christians. Japan had a small Christian population at that time. He said that the mean guards would even beat the other guards. "We learned on Rice Street, 'If you can't
take him, don't mess around with him.' I stayed away from the bad guards."
That advice didn't always work. "One day I was drilling into the rock with my jack hammer. It weighed about 35 lbs., and that
was a lot of weight for the shape I was in. This guard said something to me, and I didn't understand. I told him that in Japanese. He said it again, slower and louder, but, of course I still didn't
understand. He came up from the floor with his fist and caught me on the side of the head. I remember thinking, 'You little son of a bitch, I wish I had you back on Rice Street.'"
It turned out that
the guard was trying to measure the depth of the hole and every time he did, the grease would shoot out from the jack hammer and hit him in the side of the face. "Once I found out what he wanted, it
actually made sense to me."
Kurvers recalls that one day one of his fellow prisoners went berserk. He started marching around with a broom all the time, and even took it to the morning gathering of
prisoners where he would stand at attention. The guards, seeing his mental condition, put him to work in the kitchen. He was never without his broom.
The day the prisoners found out the war ended, he
turned to one of his buddies, threw the broom down, and said, "I wonder if it's time to get rid of this ——ing broom." Kurvers said that even the man's closest friends didn't know he was
faking his insanity.
One way to get out of the mines was to break a bone. Kurvers said there was a prisoner who would charge other prisoners three bowls of rice for a broken arm and seven bowls of
rice for a broken leg. "It was better to be in the hospital than to be in the mine."
When the atomic bomb hit Nagasaki, the prisoners who weren't working that shift saw the mushroom cloud. Kurvers was
down in the mine, and did not see it.
Not long afterward, On Aug. 15, the Japanese announced their surrender. The prisoners, who didn't know the war was over, were strangely allowed to go home early
from their shift one day. "We knew something was up." And shortly after that, the guards disappeared.
The men fed themselves for a few days out of theirs and the guards' rations. The first one to
enter camp was not an American soldier, but a news correspondent, George Weller.
Weller, who had earlier earned a Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting, was the first corresponded to report on the
bombing of Nagasaki. Much of his report, though, was censored by the U.S. government.
One day an American plane flew over, and a parcel was dropped on the camp, and the men eagerly tore it open.
"Some of the prisoners had left the camp right away, and the parcel was filled with notes from them." Later food parcels began to be dropped. "One guy lost a leg when he was hit by five cases of fruit
cocktail. He died shortly after that."
Finally, the prisoners were loaded on a train and taken to Nagasaki where they could see the damage from the atomic bomb. "It was a mess, and it stank. I don't
know if it was human flesh, but it stank."
Kurvers was put on a destroyer that took him to Okinawa. From there it was an Army transport plane back to Manila. "That was the first and last time I ever
flew in my life. I don't know if it was from being in the hold of that ship, but I just can't be in a closed-off area."
From there it was a long ship ride back to California. His weight was down to
about 80 lbs. after three and one half years of near starvation. "I was starting to put weight back on, but I had to take it easy. I told myself that we were going to food, and I didn't have to overdo it
on the ship. There was going to be plenty."
His back pay for his time as a prisoner amounted to $2,300. "I came home with a knife, spoon, fork and my ass, and that's all." The knife, spoon and fork
are now in a display at the Minnesota History Center.
At Fort Carson, Colorado, the doctors found a spot of tuberculosis on Kurvers' kidney. He got home, was reunited with his girlfriend, but then
spent the next year at the Glen Lake Sanatorium in what would later become Minnetonka.
Kurvers found out when he got home that his father had died 13 months earlier. His father had known he was a POW,
but never knew more. In his three years and four months as a prisoner, Kurvers said he only got one letter. "It was from my aunt. She filled out a post card at the State Fair and somehow it got to me.
That's all I got, one postcard. My girlfriend wrote hundreds of letters, and not one of them got through."
Freed from his TB, Kurvers took a job with the U.S. Post Office and worked there for 36 years
before retiring. He married his sweetheart, Dorothy, and they had three children. Dorothy died the day after their 50th wedding anniversary.
Kurvers lives in a house in the Highland Park area of St.
Paul, a home he has owned for the past 60 years.
"I think I was lucky. When the war was over, I never carried that hatred around with me for the Japanese. I never hated them. What the hell good does
it do you?"
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