Oral History Interview with E. H. Mitchell Page: 8

                                
cover on both sides of the road. Hill went to the east and I thought that I should go with
the others to the west. We stopped in a banana grove about a hundred yards from the
road and I dropped facing the road and watched the Jap column move past. The tanks
were followed by trucks, the last truck had a cow in tow.
I awakened about dawn and found that I was alone in the grove. I moved across the road
and looked for Hill, I found no one. Knowing that there was nothing but Japanese to the
south, I started north hoping to locate the lap column and, avoiding them, join VC and
the 73 - South of Ganassi where a branch road leads east around lake Lanao, a young
Moro told me that many Japanese had gone east. While trying to generate an idea, I
heard marching feet on the road behind me. I took cover under an elevated end of a
bamboo shack at the road junction. Soon a Jap scout came around behind the shack
looking all around in the distance. lie had not seen me but his rifle was pointed directly
at my head. When he did look in my direction I'm sure he was as startled as I was. He
pulled me out by the strap on my field glasses, threw away my tin hat, took my field
glasses and pistol,. He then marched me to the road where another scout assisted in tying
my hands behind me and giving me a painfully sharp jab in the buttocks with a bayonet,
started me south on the flank of the marching column. Many men on the flank of the
column stepped out of column to kick my shins and elsewhere or slug my face. Further
down the column, a husky Jap with a black beard, very rare among Japanese, stepped
from the column, reversed his rifle, and was swinging it from the muzzle like a golf club.
I thought he was climbing. When I approached he swung at my head, I ducked as far as I
could but the rifle butt caught my scalp and turned back a couple of inches. I would have
fallen except for the scout giving a hard pull on the rope that tied my hands. Further

along we met the first lap officer I had seen. Here we turned around and joined the
column. When we were about where I was captured, the column halted and the lap
lieutenant screamed for something. Soon he had a helmet full of water, a colored cloth, a
clean Filipino army shirt. He washed the blood from my head and face without touching
the wound. He put the cloth around my head like a turban, gave me the clean shirt, and
the two of us proceeded forward in a small truck. About half a mile down the road J was
t aken into a grain field where several lap officers were sitting on a woven mat. Ater

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