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caught him they put him in a line with others of these people that were insurgents, or whatever you want to call them and the Japanese were going to machine gun them. Standing up in a line they turned a machine gun on them. They shot everyone except one guy right behind him and 20 to 30 guys in front of him; they were going down the line. He watched and when the machine gunner was distracted he fell on the ground among the other individuals. Fortunately they didn't come along and bayonet them or anything like that so he got out of that. Another thing he told me and probably the greatest thing that he had happen, the greatest act of valor or greatest act of courage that I can think of. He and some of his friends had read in the Filipino newspaper that on such and such a day the Admiralty was going to be in the harbor and they were going to throw a big feast. He and his friends went down and got hired on as servers. They knew that the Japanese were crazy about canned food like corn and beans and all that sort of stuff. So he and his friends went around and opened up all the gallon cans and let them sit around there for two or three days and by gosh the Japs came in and ate that stuff and about two or three days after that they had it in the newspaper, big headlines, half of Admiralty dies of botulism. He was responsible for that. He got away by getting in a garbage cart. You can imagine one of those carts full of garbage. He got in there and they covered him up with garbage and he got out. They caught him later and that's how I found out about all this.
They took him and beat him across the back with barbed wire. One day when I was getting ready to go to church he was across the hall from me. He roomed with me down in Greely, Colorado. He had these barbs, he had little things like an asterisk two or three inches apart from one another two or three inches all up and down his back. Then there was a red slash where the barbed wire itself had cut him when they beat him. They caught
The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Albert Finley. Finley joined the Marine Corps around December of 1943. He provides vivid details of his boot camp experiences. He served with Headquarters Company, 4th Marines, as a radar mechanic on Corsairs, repairing radio and radar gear. Beginning in September of 1944 they traveled to Guam, Kwajalein, Pearl Harbor and Majuro in the Marshall Islands. Finley shares a number of anecdotal stories, including working with POWs. He was discharged in the fall of 1946.
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