Yorktown Aviator  "My Experience as Prisoner of War 
by the Imperial Japanese."

told by Jean Balch

This is the story of the infamous Japanese Ofuna interrogation camp.  It was occupied mostly by captured Navy flyers, including Adm. "Pop" Condit and WWII ace, "Pappy Boyington."  Camp Ofuna was a place where people were killed and lost their health by inches.  Pow's there were regarded as disgraced and entitled to live only by the tolerance of their captors.  It was established in the spring of 1943 as a temporary camp for short term POWs run by Japanese Naval Intelligence for the purpose of gaining military information, but as it turned out many POWs were there much longer.  Jean Balch, was among the fearless, courageous and one of the hero's of the camp for probably keeping many POWs alive, while at the same time paying a very heavy personal price.  Jean was later to serve as a star witness from 1947 to 1948 to testify against those same Japanese officers and guards, at their War Crimes trial, who tortured him and killed many of his friends while POWs there.  Here, then is his amazing story.

shot down; 13 bullet holes in parachute

  SB2C-3-Flight.jpg (28630 bytes)At the age of only twenty one, Jean flew off the deck of the USS Yorktown in a SB2C Helldiver with Bombing Squadron Three as a gunner on January 16, 1945 and while on a strike over Hong Kong he was shot down by anti aircraft fire just as they were pulling out of a dive.  He managed to bail out from 600 feet with the pilot, Lt. John Homer Lavender, dying as the plane crashed into the side of a mountain and the plane exploding.  Jean states, "I was looking straight to a 23 foot parachute while the Japanese were shooting at me.  They put 13 bullet holes through the parachute as I descended but none in me."

   I drifted across the river, landing in a spot called Kennedy Town, and was taken in by a Chinese family who gave me some Chinese clothes and a little straw hat.  About two hours later I was captured by Hong Kong police who could speak pretty good English.  They beat me up and wanted to know where I got my clothes and I told them I had stolen them off a clothes line.

  I was taken to the Kempi Tia headquarters where I was handcuffed, blind folded and beaten.  From time to time the blind fold was knocked off my face and when that happened all ten of my captors immediately stopped whatever they were doing to me.  Once the blind fold was put back on the beatings resumed.  Afterwards I was thrown into a cell and eventually I could recognize some lines etched on a wall that someone used to track the number of days he spent there.  But the strangest etching of all was the one showing KILROY hanging over a fence with the notation "Kilroy was here!"                                            Prisoner of War Medal

Click here for the free previews of the Academy Award Winning Movie about
the USS Yorktown, "The Fighting Lady.

CV 5 Yorktown and CV 10 Yorktown confuses Japanese Interrogators

 

  Eventually I was hauled out of there, put in a truck to a regular prison.  The next day I was taken out of my cell to my first interrogation.  They knew from the contents of my wallet and ID that I was stationed on the Yorktown.  They were under the assumption that the Yorktown was sunk, which of course it (CV-5) had been sunk at the battle of Midway.  But in the meantime the CV 10 had been built (and also named the Yorktown) and this really confused the Japanese considerably.

  Japanese interrogation is a tedious thing.  They start with the day you were born, went to grammar school and going into great detail of every part of your life, which takes an incredible length of time.  They asked if I knew where I was and I told them, "No!"  They had a map of Hong Kong and Canton which they had taken from my flight suit.  During the interrogation, I was handcuffed behind my back, tied with ropes and around my arms and neck and while having a pole run under my arms they would beat me real bad.  After awhile they put me back into my cell and in there would repeat the beatings.

   The next morning they took me out with two other GIs and led us to the docks where we were put on a small boat to be transferred to a Japanese destroyer escort.  That night we sailed out of Hong Kong.  We laid over in a Chinese port and various Japanese military people would come by our area and beat us up pretty good, including pulling hair out of our chests.

Yorktown aviator put on display for Japanese civilians to degrade

  We eventually arrived at a port in Formosa, stayed there two days and nights in a cramped, makeshift brig built inside an industrial building.  We were then flown out of there on an American made DC 3 with a great big red "meat ball" painted on the side and arrived in Tokyo. Later we were put on a train where we were put on display to the Japanese civilians who would come up us and spit in our faces and beat on us.

   We rode the train to Camp Ofuna, arriving there about midnight.  One of the POWs in our group could no longer walk for lack of food for several days, so we put him in a wheelbarrow and pushed him up to the camp.

  In Ofuna, the REAL HELL STARTED!  I know that people like to hear about the most atrocious thing that happened to a POW but they are the hardest for me to talk about.  Lots of people died in Ofuna. It was an absolute "Hell Hole".  We were dying on about 500 calories a day.

 

   They killed people by inches

  They literally killed people by inches.  Eventually hunger ceases to be a physical thing and starts to be a mental thing.  I got to where I could almost tell who would die next because when a man gives up...he's through.

  I stayed in solitary confinement at Ofuna over six months.  Incidentally there are advantages to being in solitary confinement because you can often out think your captors.  Based on the tenor of the interrogation by the Japanese it was possible to tell how the war was going.  We also had new prisoners coming into camp and Americans are extremely adept at getting and sharing information.

  When the bombs started dropping on Tokyo and Yokohama, the prison guards, Nakakichi, Nishi and Mori would come into my cell at night with real big clubs and beat on me and stomp on me, over and over again. 

 For protection, I would lay on my stomach, get in a fetal position, cover my head with my arms and hope for the best while they constantly beat on me with those big clubs.  This went on almost daily when I first got there.

  Camp Ofuna was operated by Japanese Naval Intelligence.  The camp commander, Aida, was well educated with the camp operating as an interrogation center.  The interpreters were also well educated and spoke reasonable English, but couldn't understand other idioms of expression.  Because of this we could put some real heavy trash on them.  One thing the interpreters didn't want the camp commander to know was that they couldn't understand the slang we were using.  We found out later that they often misquoted and even made up some really bad statements to hide their ignorance and to make us look bad.

  The camp's doctor consisted of a medical technician by the name of Kitamura Congochyo.  He lanced a boil behind my ear in a dusty, dirty part of the compound and then packed the incision with dirty old rags soaked in fish oil and sulfur.  We called him "Quack!"  Given a chance we all thought he would kill us...He was a very bad SOB.

  Incidentally, one of the interpreters by the name of Sato, was said to be educated at the University of Chicago and was a professor at Harvard before the war.  He was part Hawaiian and later imprisoned by the Japanese after the war for being pro-American.

   After spending considerable time in solitary confinement, I finally got outside.  I learned that there were some things you didn't do at Ofuna.  You could never whistle, sing, laugh or talk to other prisoners.  Our captors also invoked the philosophy that if one guy was bad, all were bad...so everyone was punished for the wrongdoing of the other.  I recall one time of having to stand at attention for ten solid hours.  If you fell down your chances are you wouldn't have been able to get up again.  I witnessed many, many atrocities in Ofuna which are extremely hard to tell about.

  During the time I spent in solitary I began to calculate what was happening with the war.  I came to believe that the war would end 90 days from the First of May.  I told this to other POWs which was first treated as a joke.  But after repeating it long enough everyone began believing it! It got so that I could look at any shadow in the compound and tell what day it was.  I would tell everyone to just hold tight...that the war would be over 90 days after the First of May.

  Well, the time went by the first prediction date...and even though I was only off 13 days it really got to me...I took it real hard.  Even so, I'm convinced that the first prediction provided hope for others and gave them the strength to hold tight a little longer.  As I said before, you could almost tell when a guy was going to die because he gave up...and usually died! 

Are you going to die tonight?

  There were some POWs I couldn't help so I'd start ragging on them saying, "well, you going to die tonight?"  And, if it got to a point that he couldn't stand up, I'd get him up on his feet and rag on him some more until he'd get mad enough at me to stick it out.

   On August 29, 1945, when we were liberated, I weighed only 94 pounds.  I was transferred to the hospital ship USS Benevolence and eventually transferred back to the States.  I was in a real bad shape physically.  I had scurvy, beriberi, hepatitis, dysentery and every known intestinal parasite.

   I am now 73 years old and have been retired from the contracting business for 17 years.  I've managed to survive all my wartime ailments and diseases and have never been sick since those terrible days in Ofuna as a POW.

  However, when I was younger, like most kids that age, I felt like I could take care of myself any time, any where, and in any kind of situation.  But when you find yourself tied up like a pig, bound, gagged, blindfolded and can't move, you have but one place to turn...ONE...and that's to God.

Promises made...if I live through this...

  We made a lot of promises as a result of this experience and I gleaned an immense amount of strength from it.  But after everything was said and done I eventually came to realize that the good Lord must have had a purpose for me to let me survive. So I started spending a lot of money and a lot of time to feed people the world around and I'm not even close to keeping all of my promises.  1998 photo

 

Says Robert A. McPherson, Rear Admiral (ret.) USS Yorktown

  "The Yorktown remained at sea [when the treaty with Japan] was signed.  [The Yorktown] was furnishing supplies to our POW pilots.  At a number of POW prisons, huge letters on the roofs were spelled out which told which pilots were there.  We spent every night making silk parachutes and the during the day dropped them chocolate bars, milk, cookies, ice cream, rations and everything possible to keep them happy until our Army rescued them a week later.  The Nip prison guards had just walked away!"

After the war, the War Crimes Tribunal sentenced to death Aida, Commanded of the Ofuna Camp.  Of the three guards, Nakakichi was sentenced to 12 years in prison.  Nishi for 15 years and Mori was sentenced to 15 years.    As for Kitamura Congochyo "Quack", he received the death penalty.  Sato, the Harvard Professor and one of the interrogators at the camp, it is believed he was not tried before the War Crimes Tribunal.

Historical note: Three and a half years of the War Crimes trials, 5,700 Japanese defendants were accused of war crimes; 3,000 were convicted and; 920 were executed.  That means ONE execution for every 250 prisoners that were killed.  230,000 total prisoners died, killed, tortured to death or starved to death.  General McArthur permitted no pictures of the executions of the war criminals.  The Japanese bodies were cremated.  American POWs were all but forgotten by the United States Government"  The History Channel

 

Says Willie, a combat veteran of the USS Yorktown:

 

I was a very young teenager swimming in the Mississippi river between the cotton warehouse and Stuyvesant docks when I first saw a Jap. This was the only place on the east bank where you could actually walk to the river’s edge. In those days there was almost always a Jap ship at Sty docks loading scrap iron. The sound of scrap falling into the hold after being released from the powerful electo-magnets was the dominant sound in that part of the riverfront.


A Jap sailor apparently anxious to try out his English joined us once as we rested on the batture. He gave each of us a Jap coin and I was impressed by his small stature as he started questioning us about swimming in such a dangerous place. Even though I was only about thirteen I was as tall as he was.


Hitler was about to start WW2 and when that subject came up I remember he showed two fingers together and said Japan and Germany were as close as that.
Black and White Photograph of soldiers questioning japanese soldier


During the war I thought about that Jap when we were decimating their merchant fleet and wondered where he may have died as his chances of surviving the war were slim to none.
It was four or five years after this meeting I next saw Japs when they were brought aboard our ship by high line from destroyers. It seems we often had prisoners aboard. My impression then as they stepped onto the fantail; are these little men the bad ass Japs causing all this trouble.

 
If they had clothes on other than skivvies they were regulation US Navy dungarees. They were confined to the brig or an isolated fourth deck sleeping compartment and ate the same food we ate. One of the marines who guarded them told me they would pick at the food and only eat certain things that appealed to them. They wouldn’t sit on our trough seats and squatted to defecate. Most were docile but there was always one or two who were still arrogant.


At no time were any of them hit or abused in anyway.


They showed great concern when the general alarm and bugle sounded for battle stations, wanting to know if that was “Japanee” planes.


While we didn’t care if they lived or died and at that time most of us hated all Japanese, I don’t believe there was a man aboard who could have physically mistreated them.
I contrast that to the Japs who held American prisoners. The name of the game for them was beat, starve and commit atrocities on our people.


Yes, the Japanese are friendly and accommodating since our war with them, but we won that war. I can’t help but wonder how would they act if they had won.


I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and even forgive, but never forget and never completely trust.  By the way: the conspiracy weasels have sniffed and rooted around in the sale of scrap to the Japs.
I’m sure they would love to hang the treason label on some of our leaders of that time.

Read more about the most famous ship in the history of the US Navy,

The USS Yorktown
click here

 




2025 © www.YorktownSailor.com