Monday, May 26, 1997
Prisoner of the Japanese remembers the war
By KEN ELLSWORTH Senior Staff Writer
SWEETWATER - Stanley Ragain, now 77 and a former World War
II prisoner of the Japanese, still has haunting, hellacious nightmares.
"Sometimes I stay up until 1 in the morning just to keep
from going to bed," Ragain said last week at his Sweetwater
home.
"You just need to stop thinking about it, stop talking
about it," responded his wife, Johnnie, his wife of 52 years.
But, Stanley Ragain does not stop thinking, talking, or reading
about the the soldiers who, like himself, became prisoners. He
has a collection of books written by former POWs, and a stack
of boxes containing other war memorabilia.
"I buy all those books I can find. My wife usually reads
the books before I do," he said.
"That's why the house is such a mess," Johnnie Ragain
said as she laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
Johnnie Ragain said she does her best to screen the POW books
before her husband reads them, trying to protect him from his
memories.
"<n>'Hon, I don't think you should read this,' I
tell him, because he has trouble sleeping if he reads or sees
too much about it," she explained.
Stanley Ragain, a retired Lone Star Industries truck driver,
reads the books anyway. He cannot help himself.
Sometimes his wife goes so far as to put a book where her husband
will not easily find it, but it does no good.
"He gets up in the night and finds it and reads it anyway,"
she said. "Sometimes those books make him think of that little
cage they (the enemy) put him in over there."
"Well, I can tell you that everything in those books is
true, because I've been there and seen it," Stanley Ragain
said.
Stanley Reagain has also written a manuscript of his own POW
experience, one to add to all the others. It lies safely in a
big chest. He sometimes thinks of submitting it to a publisher,
but never has. <s^box<s^box<s^box
Stanley and Johnnie Ragain, both then of Loraine, had been
dating for just a few months in 1941. He was 21, she was 19. On
July 14, Stanley Ragain and his brother, Lloyd, were hoeing cotton.
Lloyd, two years older than Stanley and who had already been
drafted, invited his brother to come with him to the Army recruitment
office in Sweetwater.
"We threw our hoes away in another field and left,"
Stanley Ragain said.
By that same night both the brothers were on their way to Fort
Bliss in El Paso.
Johnnie Ragain was shocked.
"I just thought he (Stanley) was busy hoeing cotton,"
she recalled. She was not to see Stanley again until Oct. 27,
1945, and they married that very day.
Lloyd and Stanley ended up being prisoners together, and they
managed to survive together. Their other two brothers, James and
Leroy, also fought in and survived World War II. Stanley, however,
is the only brother is still living today.
Lloyd and Stanley Ragain were sent to the Philippines, where
they served with the Army Air Corps in the 440th Aviation Ordinance
Battalion. Eventually, the brothers' unit was assigned to Del
Monte air base on the island of Mindinao. Stanley Ragain's job
was to load bombs on B-17 bombers.
The war in the Philippines was going badly at the end of 1941,
and General Douglas MacArthur was ordered to leave. Some troops
were evacuated. Those that remained were not resupplied.
"We never got to load even one B-17 before the Japanese
bombed the field and got all 17 of the B-17s but one. Early the
next morning the Japanese came back and got that one. There we
were, two companies, about 150 men, and we didn't have anything
to do but just wait for the Japanese to come and take us. We weren't
a fighting outfit like the Marines." Stanley Ragain said.
By May of 1942, most Americans, after bitter fighting had been
ordered to surrender. In the north Philippines, thousands of Americans
endured or died in the infamous Bataan Death March.
Stanley Ragain's unit was not a part of that, but the 150 men
and 14 female of his unit were taken prisoner on May 10. The coming
ordeal was to be the near equal of the death March.
"May 10, that was the day that Hell began for us for three
years," Ragain said.
"Terrible things happened to the nurses," Ragain
said. "They were supposed to be flown out before the Japanese
came, but the plane never came. They could have flown us out,
too, but they never did."
Ragain's manuscript put it this way, "We will never forgive
the Japanese (he uses a shorter version of the word), but what
is so bad is we can never forgive the Americans for not getting
us out."
Stanley and Lloyd became prisoners in the Philippines. They
were together, moving from one internment camp to the next for
two years, joining more prisoners. They survived disease, malnutrition,
and brutality. Many did not.
Shortly after their capture, Stanley Ragain watched Japanese
soldiers force three or four Philippine soldiers to dig their
own graves shortly before they shot the men and and shoved into
the holes.
"I knew then it was going to be rough," Stanley Ragain
said.
Stanley Ragain and his fellow captives were forced by the Japanese
to raise rice, vegetables, and sweet potatoes for the war effort.
They were given only small portions of rice and sweet potato vines
to eat. Tropical fruits abounded in the area. They were given
none.
"Take the sweet potato vine and boil it in water without
seasoning and that is vine soup," Stanley Ragain said. "Men
ate rats, dogs, cats, anything they could find. Dogs did not last
long if they wandered into the camp. I don't think I ever ate
rat or dog, but once I ate cat stew. It was pretty good, darn
good."
Stanley Ragain stood six-feet tall and weighed 190 pounds when
he went to the Philippines. After one year as a prisoner he weighed
just 100 pounds. The rest of the Americans were skin and bones,
too. They had no pants, shirts, or shoes, and wore only loin cloths
secured by a string.
"We turned black in the sun," he said.
Stanley Ragain once was with a group of prisoners who were
being punished by being forced to sit on their crossed legs. After
8 hours, Ragain leaned a bit to one side in his misery. A guard
hit Ragain in the head with his rifle butt and Ragain passed out
for just second or two.
"If I hadn't come to so quickly, I think he would have
bayonetted me," Stanley said. Other men, however, were killed,
outright, he said. Others went on work details and never returned.
"I didn't get as many beatings as most, though,"
Stanley Ragain said.
Men were forced, he said, to sit in four-foot by four-foot
holes covered by lids for days in the sweltering heat. They had
to sit in their own body waste, Ragain said.
"Their were some pretty nice guards sometimes, but they
always removed them for being too soft," Ragain said.
Starvation and disease were sometimes worse than the guards
and, maybe, more lethal.
"I was almost dead once. I had beriberi, malaria, and
dysentery. But I heard something going on outside. I struggled
out, barely able to walk, to see what was going on. A prisoner
unfolded his Army blanket and there was an American flag sown
on it. The other men sat around him and they all sang "God
Bless America." I was sure if the guards saw what was happening
they would have shot into them. But they didn't."
In the Ragains Sweetwater home today is an old green Army blanket
on which is sewn an American flag. Johnnie and Stanley Ragain
made it to remember the courageous prisoner who originally created
the patriotic blanket. It honors the other thousands of prisoners,
too, Stanley Ragain said, of his copy of the blanket.
By mid-1944 the Japanese war effort in the Pacific had begun
to fail, island after island falling to American troops. The Japanese
began shipping POWs to Japan to work in factories.
"We were cheap labor," Stanley Ragain said.
The prisoners were processed through Bilibad Prison in Manilla.
There, conditions were so horrible and crowded that prisoners
died by the hundreds, Ragain said.
"In the building we stayed in there was no room to lie
down so we had to lie on top of each other. I had dysentery, so
they let me lie on top so I could get up and run outside,"
Ragain said.
Stanley Ragain and his brother Lloyd were sent on the same
ship to Japan, a ship formerly used for transporting cattle. Six-hundred
prisoners were crowded into the stinking, humid hold. They slept
on the cattle manure which had not been cleaned out. Two other
similar ships sailed with them, also carrying 600 prisoners each.
The ships were called Hell-ships by the Americans. The other two
ships were sunk en route by American submarines.
"The ship my brother and I were on, we were lucky, because
they didn't get us. Well, I don't know whether we were lucky or
not," Ragain said, referring to hard times that were to come
during the next year in Japan.
The 2,500-mile trip to Japan took 90 days. It should have taken
about two weeks, Ragain said. Dozens of Americans died during
the trip and were thrown into the sea.
"One of them was my friend. He was very sick and he was
having a hard time breathing. I was just skin and bones myself,
but I managed to carry him to where he could get a little more
air. Next morning he was gone. I asked where he was. They said
he died and was thrown overboard," Ragain said.
In Japan, Stanley and Lloyd Ragain were sent to work in metal
processing factories in Yokachi, forced again to labor in support
of the war. Conditions, again, were horrible.
Once Stanley Regain found dozens of boxes piled high in a factory.
They were filled with the bodies of dead Americans.
Many Americans had long since lost the desire to live, he said.
"They didn't have the will power. They'd rather be dead
than put up with the conditions. I had friends who had just given
up. I tried to talk to them, but their minds would just go away
and I couldn't talk them out of it and they'd die," Ragain
said.
He said he caught pneumonia and was close to death.
"I woke up one morning with the kind of blanket they had
to put on you when you were dead. I kicked it off. I said, 'Why'd
you put that blanket on top of me?' A sergeant told me. He said,
'Ragain, we thought you was dead.'"
In the spring of 1945, Stanley Ragain was sent to work in factory
in Toyama, about 130 miles east of Tokyo, and was separated from
Lloyd for the first time. Stanley Ragain was with about 150 other
American prisoners in their Toyoma camp.
One night in July, American bombers came and destroyed most
of the town and damaged the factory. The prisoners, Ragain said,
sat in a huge foxhole they had dug and cheered the American planes.
"We were all hollerin'. The next day there wasn't nothing
left of Toyama but black country," Ragain said.
In early August, a few days after the Toyama raid, nuclear
bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ragain said
they heard about it from their Japanese guards.
"They told us how cruel Americans were," Ragain said
with sarcasm.
Peace was forthcoming within days. American planes began dropping
food on the prison camp.
"Some guys nearly ate themselves to death. They ate all
the time," Ragain said.
On October 27, 1945, Stanley and Lloyd got off the bus together
in Loraine and started walking to their home. Their families had
been told earlier in the war only that the boys were "missing
in action."
But Johnnie Ragain had written to Stanley every day anyway.
"But All the letters just came back," she said.
The day that Stanley Ragain got off the bus, he and Johnnie
were married.
"But," Johnnie Ragain said, "Stanley was not
the same as when he left. He was older in years than what he was
supposed to have been."
Just surviving, though, was a miracle.
"I guess I just didn't want to die in a place like that,"
Stanley Ragain said.
He believes that POWs have not received the recognition they
deserve. He thinks POWs at the very least deserve the recognition
of Purple Hearts.
"I'm pretty bitter about they way they have handled things.
Prisoners of war are sometimes more damaged than people that were
shot. I would have been glad to have lost an arm or a leg if I
wouldn't have had to go through what I did. If I wasn't wounded,
I don't know what was," Stanley Ragain said.
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