Vet tells story of survival in Japanese prison camp

BLUEWATER BAY — Every spring, Chris Morgan’s thoughts drift back to when survival was his only concern.

It was April 29, 1945.

World War II was raging, and Morgan was a young prisoner of war in Burma’s Rangoon Jail.

Although starving and weak from bouts of malaria, he knew Allied forces were nearby.

“Almost on a daily basis, there were air raids over Rangoon,” recalls Morgan, who is 86 and lives with his wife, Connie, in Bluewater Bay. “I knew that five miles up there, there were free Americans.”

So did his Japanese captors.

They abandoned the prison camp that day and forced some of the men to march north out of Rangoon.

Sixty-five years have passed since Morgan’s liberation by British soldiers two days later on May 1, but his memories of those people, places and events have not faded.

“Everything is quite vivid,” Morgan says. “It was the most negative experience of my life.”

Answering the call

Like most people alive in 1941, he remembers exactly where he was when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on Dec. 7.

“I was standing in front of an ice-cream shop with my buddies,” says Morgan, who was a high school senior in Yonkers, N.Y. “We all wanted to sign up right then. We all wanted to go to pilot training.”

Two years later, he was the only one of his friends who had earned his wings.

After training in Montgomery, Ala., and in Northwest Florida, he was assigned to fly the P-51 fighter.

“I was 19 and flying one of those things,” he recalls with a laugh. “That’s better than a Corvette.”

In the late summer of 1943, he boarded a troop ship in San Francisco bound for Bombay. The journey lasted nearly 50 days, and the only pastime was gambling.

“I lost all my money the first couple of days, so I spent most of my time up on deck watching the flying fish,” he says.

In October, he finally arrived at his base in Dinjan, India in the war’s China-Burma-India theater. His squadron’s job was to relieve the Flying Tigers, the 1st American Volunteer Group.

“My first mission was on Oct. 16, 1943, and that was the day I went down,” says Morgan, who had been flying over the jungles of Burma. “My flight leader got disoriented. The sad part of it was, I knew where I was the whole time.

“I told him I could get him home, but he just pointed to his collar and told me to get back into formation. Being a good soldier, I did.”

Morgan eventually ran out of fuel and had to land in a rice field.

“I evaded for three days,” he recalls. “I hooked up with some Burmese natives who led me into an ambush.”

Barely 20 years old, Morgan found himself in the hands of Japanese soldiers.

“I wasn’t afraid of the Japanese,” he says. “I was afraid of the unknown.”

After surviving interrogation, the enemy soldiers set off toward Rangoon Jail.

“We walked, rode camels, rode railroads,” he says. “It was a 1,000-mile trip. … All the (illnesses) you pick up in that section of the world, I had ’em.”

‘Drowning from within’

Morgan arrived at Rangoon Jail on a stretcher, but that didn’t stop the Japanese soldiers from putting him in solitary confinement for three months.

“Their psychology was that it was supposed to break our spirit,” Morgan says.

It didn’t work, and eventually his captors let him stay among the other prisoners.

“It was mostly British, and there were Chinese and Indians in the camp,” he adds.

It was a place of starvation and constant sickness, where the prisoners survived on a pittance of rice, clear soup and pumpkins.

“We had very little to eat,” he says. “The biggest killer in the camp was beriberi. … beriberi is like drowning from within.”

Cholera struck the prison camp in June 1944. It killed with a swiftness that still amazes Morgan.

“It was a most dreaded disease,” he says. “You’re violently sick at 5 a.m. and then dead by 5 p.m.”

Morgan and one of his friends, a Canadian flight officer named Jim Drake, volunteered to sit with the dying men.

“There was nothing we could do for them,” he says. “The fixation we talked about was getting out, going home.”

Morgan remembers that Drake was worried they would all be dead by Christmas 1944 if they weren’t rescued soon.

His friend, he says, had lost his hope.

Drake died from beriberi on Christmas Day.

“That scared the daylights out of me,” says Morgan, adding that his friend’s death motivated him to stay mentally and physically tough.

To stay alert, he and other inmates would do calisthenics and quiz each other on the 48 states and their capitals.

“To this day, I do a crossword puzzle each day,” he says.

Left in a rice field

As their captivity lasted into the next year, Morgan and other inmates began thinking about breaking out.

“We had plans of our own,” he says. “We were going to take them over.”

They never got the chance because on April 29, 1945, the Japanese separated the men into two groups — those who could walk and those who couldn’t.

The sick were left behind at Rangoon Jail, and the rest were marched north about 50 miles.

Among those prisoners was a British general, Morgan recalls.

“(The Japanese) told him, ‘Give our men 10 minutes and then you are free,’” he says. “And that’s what happened. They left us in a rice field.”

But nearby British forces began strafing the field and inadvertently killing the British general. The prisoners scattered in fear.

“I jumped in a well,” Morgan recalls. “I jumped in on top of five other guys and about 10 more jumped in on top of me.”

After surviving the rescue, Morgan, who was 21 by then, was shipped back to the states to recuperate in Atlantic City, N.J. When he was able, he made his way back to Yonkers.

“The most emotional moment I had throughout everything that happened was coming home,” Morgan says. “My parents collapsed in my arms.”

‘Thank God for freedom’

In the decades following the war, Morgan met and married Connie and raised three daughters and one son.

Many years passed before he was able to talk freely about his POW experience.

“The things that were important to me were life and death,” he says of that time in his life. “Anything else was frivolous. That’s a good attitude for a prison camp. It’s not a good social attitude.”

In college, Morgan still suffered the residual affects of malaria. He went on to become a staunch advocate for POWs and POW military benefits.

He was the proud owner of the first POW license plate in the state of New Jersey.

Morgan understands that prison camps are part of war, but he can’t forget what he suffered at the hands of the Japanese.

“No country going into war prepares for prisoners. That’s why you have the mistreatment,” he says. “The only prejudice I have today is I won’t buy a Japanese car.”

Connie says her husband worked hard to share with his family his strong attachment to God and country.

“The loyalty he’s instilled in our children comes from within,” she says. “Every single one of them, they fly their flags, and the grandchildren always acknowledge their grandfather on Veterans Day.”

These days, Morgan’s life is filled with volunteering, travel, golf and family activities, but he always takes time to honor the people he served with in World War II.

“I’ll never forget them, the heroes,” he says. “I have memories of friends who are gone, and those are the memories I cherish.”