Life in captivity
In Los Baños, Laguna, at the Philippine Agricultural College and Forestry Campus, now called the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, which was located on a 60 acre site, was the POW and civilian internment camp, wedged between the foothills of Mount Makiling and the northern shore of Los Baños facing Laguna de Bay. The main internment building was inside Baker Hall, a gymnasium, where most internees had been incarcerated since 1942.
Surrounded by barbed wire fences in clusters of hatched huts were 8,146 POWs: 7,000 Filipinos, 1,527 Americans, 329 British, 133 Australians, 89 Dutch, 30 Norwegians, 22 Poles, 16 Italians, and 1 Nicaraguan. Aside from eleven navy nurses under the command of Chief Nurse Laura M. Cobb (some of U.S. military nurses known as the "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor") and a few servicemen, most of the internees were civilian businessmen, teachers, bankers, and missionaries caught by the Japanese during the course of the war and incarcerated in various POW camps in the country.
On 14 May 1943, as the prisoner population at the University of Santo Tomas internment camp rose to unmanageable levels, the internees were transferred to the new Los Baños facility, some seventy kilometers (45 mi) away from Manila.
While incarcerated, the POWs had formed a committee to deal with the guards for self-governing purposes and to obtain whatever marginal freedom or concessions they could obtain from the Japanese prison authorities. Nonetheless, the internees were made to get by on dwindling rations, limited clothing, poor housing and non-existent sanitation, and endure the sadistic tendencies of the camp guards. By early 1945, the conditions in the camp turned hellish, with enforced limited rations and mounting abuse, courtesy of the camp's second-in-command, Warrant Officer Sadaaki Konishi.
