| Summary: | Mr. John Hanback describes hearing about the POWs impending release, escape attempts and religion in the camps.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with John W. Hanback
November 17, 2010
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood
Clip 4
Rhonda Haygood: So when did you find out you were going to be released?
John Hanback: I believe it was the 27th of July and I got released on the 29th of August and, but we had—there was a, a North Korean or they said it was, we found out later it was a South Korean guy, that had got through their lines and got up there where we were at and he come through the camp there and he was telling us, “Don’t worry,” said, “they signed the Armistice yesterday,” or something like that. Said, “You’ll be out in about four weeks.” Well, they were right, just about four or five weeks we, we were out. But they told us that about a day or two after they, everybody started telling about, “We know we’re gonna get out; they signed the Armistice.” You know, we’d tell the North Koreans and they didn’t like that, how we’d found out, you know. So then they had to have us all lined up and this poor old Chinese officer, or whatever he was, got up there and made a big speech and said, you know, that he was glad that we had cooperated with them and that how the Chinese had sacrificed everything to get us out, you know. Made it all look good on their part. Yeah. They had a PA system set up in that camp, in what we called the headquarters, down the road about a half a mile. Down there, they’d get on that thing, you know and held the news, you know, course they’d tell the Chinese and the Chinese part; they didn’t tell the American side of it. But, once in a while you could pretty well tell what they were talking about.
RH: Um-hm.
JH: Yeah.
RH: How did they, how did they communicate language-wise? Did, did most of them speak English
or—?
JH: Most of them spoke a little English. You could, you could talk to them.
RH: Could you?
JH: Most of us, you know, had been in Japan so long till we was, a lot of us talked—learned a lot of Japanese and of course the characters, the Chinese and the Japanese are the same thing it’s just how you, how they say it, you know. But, about all of us, out of the 24th division, spoke enough Chinese, I mean, Japanese we could talk to them.
RH: Um-hm.
JH: And, you didn’t want to let them know that you could understand, cause they wouldn’t say nothing if they thought you could understand them; they, they wouldn’t talk, you know. But if you ever did slip up and say a few words, boy they’d get on you. They heard me and another boy talking one night about planning an escape; the next night they had me and him both in the headquarters. And I mean they give us a rounding up.
RH: Did many of the people try to escape?
JH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We had two people try it and one of them got killed. But the, the civilians killed him; the military didn’t kill him. It’s the civilians who you had to worry about; them civilians will kill you.
RH: Is that right?
JH: Yeah, cause all of their houses and everything they had was done burnt and tore up and they didn’t have nothing and they just, they didn’t like us. But, there were still some of them [unintelligible] pretty good decent people. I mean, we used to go out, and they’d tear us loose and go outside and loafer all day you know, tell us to come back, you know, before night. You go to them, to their houses and ask them for food, anything, and they’d give you anything they had. Yeah.
RH: So you weren’t in a fenced area where—?
JH: Unh-uh. No.
RH: And there weren’t guards with guns watching you.
JH: No. Unh-uh. You couldn’t go nowhere because you didn’t know where you was at.
RH: Oh.
JH: These two guys that tried to escape, that one that come back, didn‘t kill him, he said, “You go to the top of that mountain there,” he said, “you get over there and there’s another mountain that’s bigger than that one over there.” He said, “You, you don’t know where you at.” And they used to tell us, you know, “If you think you can escape,” said, “we’ll give you two or three days rations and furnish you a guard if you think you can get out of here.” But, it wouldn’t do you—you don’t know where you at, you know, you can’t go places you don’t know where you at. There’s no highways.
RH: Yeah.
JH: Just little ‘ol paths, roads and stuff, you know. There’s no vehicles over there like there are here. But, ah, there’s, it, it was some of them pretty good. There’s one—me and another boy went to one North Korean house one time that this man and woman both spoke good English and, ah, they was talking about, you know, churches and this, that and the other and the old woman went in another room and come back and she had a great big bible. She says, “Don’t you tell nobody I’ve got this.” She says, says, “They’ll kill me if they catch me with it.”
RH: Really?
JH: Yeah. They just, they don’t believe no religion; there’s no—their religion is what they say. That’s it. There’s a boy that, name of O’Keefe, a Catholic, and he decided there that he was gonna have a mass, you know, like the Catholics do. And he got him a bunch of them and got him some little pieces of bread and water and stuff, you know, and he got about half way through his thing and they caught him. Boy, they whooped the devil out of him. Yeah. You don’t, you used to say, you know, you, you thank God for such and such and they said, “You don’t thank God for nothing here.” Said, “You thank the Chinese people.” Said, “We, we’re a god here.”
RH: Eww.
JH: Yeah. You, you didn’t talk no religion at all.
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