On the morning of July 17, 1944, U.S. Army private Andrew Aquila, 26, stood in a line of 1,600 American prisoners of war that stretched down Pier 7 of Manila Harbor. It was early, but the men were already sweltering under the rising tropical sun. Sent to Manila from POW camps throughout the Philippines, the prisoners waited to board the 6,527-ton, 420-foot Nissyo Maru, a rusting Japanese cargo ship that seemed barely seaworthy.
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Nothing was worse than a World War II Japanese POW camp—except a trip on a prisoner transport ship
Shouts from the Japanese guards started the line of men moving forward. Aquila, clad only in tattered, cutoff dungarees, slung the canvas bag with his few possessions over his shoulder. He checked his pocket for the ball of rice he'd been issued, felt his half-full canteen on his belt, and finally patted the small pocket on the inside of his shorts, checking for his high school ring, which he'd managed. to keep hidden from the guards.
The youngest of eight children, Aquila had been the first in his family to graduate; his older siblings had all been forced to quit school and go to work when their father died. The ring was important, a thing of pride, but also a reminder of a place outside the hell he’d lived through since the American surrender on Bataan two years before. Every time he touched it and felt the cold, smooth gold, he knew he’d do all he could to get back home to his Italian neighborhood in Cleveland. He wondered about his family. Had any of his three brothers been drafted? Are they fighting? Are they even alive?
Another round of shouts from the guards snapped him back to reality, and he started up the gangplank. Barbarous treatment from the Japanese, harsh labor details, starvation, and disease had worn down his five-foot-eight frame to just 85 pounds, about half his normal weight. Like the others, he was suffering from dysentery, dengue fever, beriberi, malaria, and malnutrition. Still, Aquila felt lucky to be alive.
He’d already lived through so much. Drafted in 1941, he had arrived in Manila two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A headquarters messenger with B Company of the 192nd Tank Battalion, he had taken part in the heavy fighting on Luzon after the Japanese invaded. He had survived the infamous Bataan Death March that killed thousands, and the nightmare of Camp O’Donnell, his first prison, where grisly conditions and rampant disease killed an average of 300 men every day. Next, at the Cabanatuan prison camp, he'd become so sick that he'd been sent to what the men called the Zero Ward, a dark hut that housed prisoners the doctors felt had no chance of living. Aquila had made it, and over time, he had grown accustomed to deeper and deeper levels of a hellish existence that few could imagine. But as he boarded the ship, he didn’t know that an even worse hell awaited him.