I Was the One That Got the Beating
Heroes Remember
I Was the One That Got the Beating
We worked about 12 hours a day and you got fed before you left,
and you got fed when you got back, you didn’t get nothing in
between. We got a little more rations there, we got, while we
were in Hong Kong. But, like we were marched from the camp to
the shipbuilding yard and back again, and course, the civilian
people, they would spit at you and throw things at you, and
everything else. You had to get to used to that stuff. I was put
in a blacksmith shop where they formed the sheets for the sides
of the ship. Swing an 18 pound sledgehammer on a dolly, hitting
a dolly. See, they’d heat certain parts of it, and then the
Japanese, he’d hold this dolly on there, you had to hit that
where ever he held it so it shaped the . . . and trying to keep
up to, if I didn’t keep up to, the other guy was a Japanese,
swinging another hammer, there was two of us, like we’d . . .
there’d be. If I didn’t keep up to him, well then I was the one
who got the beating. But then, other guys were on the rivets,
rivetting, and other jobs like carrying steel,
and all this stuff.
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