John Hubbard

Preston Hubbard survived the Bataan Death March. He describes the day his prison camp in Nagoya, Japan was liberated:

See we are staying in camp now and of course still starving worse than ever then. Man we were hungry, ooooh. We were having quite a few deaths. They had us trying to run a few little projects around there. See they just completely smashed the railroad factory where we worked and it didn’t drop off everybody one day but it gradually ceased. The last thing we did there, at the factory, was powering up the remains -- the buildings had been burned, everything had been burned there. So we, as I say, had been in camp several days and we were working on some projects around here and there but on this day, as I say, we’d been in the camp for sometime so the Japanese soldiers ordered everybody to go to their barracks. We’re on top of the hill, the American barracks and two British barracks -- which had a lot of Australians in it too who didn’t like the British [laughing]. So we all went in and nobody said a thing. Everybody was quiet. Then we heard a great cheer, loud noise, that came from the first British barracks. Then a little later, just a matter of minutes later we heard an even louder cheer, of course it was closer to us, from the second British barrack. And it was so quiet in our -- generally there were a couple of guys fighting or something in our barracks, you know, some of the guys, that’s the way it was, but everybody was quiet. Then a little bit later a Japanese officer and a Japanese soldier came into our barracks and he announced that the war was over and boy you talk about, in our barracks, you know [laughing].

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