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KATHLEEN HALLINAN: From Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Kathleen Hallinan. The Minnesota Court of Appeals says police should have read the Miranda warning to a Saint Cloud student before questioning him about alleged criminal sexual conduct. The appeals court says the boy's taped statements in a school office should not have been admitted at his trial because police didn't inform the boy of his rights. But the appeals court upheld an earlier ruling because even without the 15-year-old's statement, the case was strong enough that it likely would have resulted in a conviction.

The owner of the bus that crashed on a Colorado mountain pass, injuring dozens of Burnsville teenagers, blames a paperwork error for a missed inspection. Peggy Thwaite, co-owner of Minnesota City Bus Service in Southern Minnesota, acknowledges the bus was nearly two months overdue for its annual inspection, which is required by state and federal law. Today's Independence Day celebrations have a special significance in Siren, Wisconsin. Organizers decided to go ahead with the usual festivities, even though many are still recovering from a mid-June tornado.

Greg Hunter is vice president of the Siren Chamber of commerce and owner of Pour House Restaurant, which was flattened by the storm. Hunter says the fourth has always been a big day in siren, and residents wanted to go ahead with the party.

GREG HUNTER: I think it's real important, especially for the people who live here, to take one day off and celebrate something like this, our Independence Day that these people have been working here for now for, I suppose, it'll be coming on to two and a half weeks, three weeks now since the storm. And the town needs to move on and quit looking back. And I think this will help with that.

KATHLEEN HALLINAN: One storm related change this year was a change in the parade route because of continuing cleanup. Mostly sunny skies are forecast throughout the day. Highs today should range from 65 near Duluth to 80 near Rochester.

That's Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Kathleen Hallinan. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Minnesota Lecet, skilled construction laborers and union contractors working together online at Minnesota laborers.org.

GARY EICHTEN: It's six minutes now past 12 o'clock.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. I hope you're having a very, very pleasant and meaningful 4th of July, Independence Day.

This hour on our Independence Day edition of Midday, we're going to hear from two World War II military veterans who more than did their part to help preserve this nation's freedom. Bloomington resident Avis Schorer was an Army nurse pinned down on the beach at Anzio, Italy, during one of World War II's most brutal battles. We'll hear her story.

Roseville resident Ken Porwoll was an Army infantryman who survived the Bataan Death March and three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese. We'll hear his story. Their accounts, rather, are part of our voices of Minnesota interview series. And here is Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

["BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?" PLAYING]

(SINGING) Once I built a railroad Now it's done Brother can you spare a dime?

DAN OLSON: The United States was emerging from the Great Depression as the war in Europe was expanding. Avis Daggett, raised on a farm in Iowa, was 22 years old. She had completed nurse's training in Des Moines and had signed on with the Red Cross. The job included a pledge to serve her country in a national emergency. Daggett, who later married and is now Avis Schorer, says she worried the US would enter the war.

AVIS SCHORER: I didn't want any part of the war. But there was this one hand where they said there was this great need for nurses in the service and then I just didn't want to be involved in it.

DAN OLSON: Did you have an inkling or did the other young women have an inkling of what war, duty, war service, taking care of soldiers might be like?

AVIS SCHORER: No, I think a lot of them thought, oh, what a lark, being surrounded by all these men. This is going to be a great opportunity to find a husband if they didn't have a boyfriend or something like that.

DAN OLSON: Schorer had no inkling she would be called up and assigned to an Army medical field hospital unit that would eventually land at Anzio, Italy, where Allied forces were trapped in one of World War II's deadliest battles.

LINDSEY BROWN: Through the dark days of the depression, I heard President Roosevelt assure us the days ahead would be better. Now, he was telling us we were at war.

DAN OLSON: 55 years after the war, Schorer has written a book about her experience. She recounts how on December 7, 1941, a neighbor pounded on her door, telling her to turn on the radio to hear the news of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

LINDSEY BROWN: Conflicting reports about the number of killed and wounded filled the airwaves. Each report was worse than the last. I wanted to run home and talk to mother and dad. I felt an overwhelming need for the security of family and home. Deep down, I knew our lives had changed on December 7.

DAN OLSON: Avis Schorer was ordered to report for Army nurse training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. She spent a year there and at other US bases.

AVIS SCHORER: When I arrived at the camp, it was a few scattered wooden barracks and gravel roads. It didn't look like my mental picture of a military installation. And when I left there a year later, there was about 100,000 troops there and 1,000 bed hospital. It just seemed to come up overnight.

LINDSEY BROWN: The atmosphere throughout the camp was restless and changing. New nurses arrived so often that I no longer try to become acquainted. Transfers to other Army posts came without warning. Old friends from my earliest Army days were among them. Every one was powerless to change military orders, and the transfers often brought a flood of tears before resignation and acceptance.

DAN OLSON: At Fort Sam Houston, near San Antonio, Texas, Avis Schorer and other medical personnel became the 56th Evacuation Hospital. In the spring of 1943, orders came to board a troop ship bound from New York but with no word on their destination.

LINDSEY BROWN: We learned that we were aboard the Mariposa, a luxury liner that had formerly sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu. The ship, built for 1,000 passengers, had been converted to a troop ship for 5,000. All doors padded with pink satin, attested to the luxurious quarters and peacetime.

Bathroom fixtures were made of marble. Two passengers had shared a stateroom that now held 15. The gleaming white ship had been painted battleship gray. We were under strict blackout conditions and no one dared light a cigarette on deck at night.

DAN OLSON: Schorer and the others in the 56th Evacuation Hospital landed in North Africa in April 1943.

AVIS SCHORER: When they were through fighting in Africa, we loaded on trucks 12 to a truck and we rode across North Africa. It took us eight days over mountains, through roads that had bomb craters in them and riverbeds that didn't have a bridge. And it was a long eight days.

We were issued-- we carried our own food and we were issued three cans of food a day. And one can was hash, one was meat and beans, about pork and beans, and the other was stew. And we were given a quart of water a day.

While we were there, on July 4-- around July 4, we received our first battle casualties. We had air raids, our first air raids. At this time, the troops were gathered there in the harbor for the invasion of Sicily. And the German planes came over and they were bombing the harbor. But some of them came awfully close to the buildings we were living in.

And from those air raids, when we first-- our first air raid, we were out there cheering like we were at a football game or something because it was quite a spectacular sight. And then we got about 200 casualties. So after that, we respected an air raid.

DAN OLSON: After the Allies defeated the Germans there, the medical unit was sent to Italy, where their hospital was much closer to the fighting, and they treated many more patients with combat wounds.

AVIS SCHORER: Often, these patients wouldn't have just one wound, but they'd have several. And it was rather appalling and sobering. This war is real and it's real to us.

DAN OLSON: Was there anything in your training for the kind of appalling conditions you were seeing in war?

AVIS SCHORER: I don't think you could train for what you see in a war. I really don't. We had Army cots and they had a thin mattress.

And if they were fortunate, they had a pillow. But we did not have sheets. We had plenty of Army blankets. And to take care of patients in those circumstances is total opposite of what we were trained to do.

LINDSEY BROWN: Soldiers arrived at the hospital caked with mud and unshaven, and they had the appearance of old men. The infantry suffered wounds much worse than those we saw from the air raids in North Africa. Our 750-bed hospital soon swelled to 1,100 patients.

The buildings could not hold all the wounded. Our men set up tents to handle the overflow. Most of the casualties did not have just one wound, but suffered multiple fractures from the shrapnel of bursting shells.

DAN OLSON: Conditions for everyone, Schorer remembers, were dreadful. The troops had the worst of it.

LINDSEY BROWN: The rain and cold brought patients with new problems. We received hundreds of men who had been sitting in foxholes filled with water. Many were unable to walk on their red, swollen feet when they reached the hospital.

The condition was called trench foot. We gave them dry socks, rest, and warm foot baths. We sent those that improved back to the front to continue fighting.

DAN OLSON: The medical personnel were coping with rain, which created knee-deep mud. Their hospital was in a bombed out building where only the stairs remained intact. One of the biggest jobs, she recalls, was cleaning up the garbage, perfect breeding ground for pests of all sorts.

LINDSEY BROWN: I was lying face down on my cot, hoping to get a little nap. I heard one of the nurses muttering and cursing when she tramped through our quarters. She carried a pail of water. What's the problem? I asked. Bedbugs, my mosquito net is full of bedbugs, was her curt answer.

I thought, momentarily, I'm glad it isn't mine. I turned onto my back. I looked up and saw thousands of bugs on the olive drab mosquito net. I quickly tore the netting from the cot, ran downstairs, and lit a match to it.

DAN OLSON: January 1944, the 56th Evacuation Hospital was ordered to pack up and move, once again, destination unknown. Schorer and the others rode on open trucks in the middle of the night to a nearby harbor where they learned they'd board ships for Anzio. The Allies had landed at the Italian port city as part of their push to take Rome.

Schorer and the others huddled together for warmth. They kept the cold, hunger and fatigue at bay with the hope they'd soon be safe and warm on a big ship. She says they were disappointed to be put on a small landing craft that proved no match for a stormy Mediterranean.

AVIS SCHORER: As soon as we got out of the shelter of the harbor, out on the sea, then there was-- a terrible storm came up. And this ship was tossed around like a cork. And so we heard this tremendous crash.

And what had happened, they had contacted an LST, which is a larger ship. And some of the nurses were terribly sick at that time. I was not sick, but I was sure fighting it. And they said we could transfer to this LST, which is a larger ship. So they threw a ladder over the side of the ship and we went up the ladder to this LST.

Well, when we got on there and we thought, this is great to be on a bigger ship. And it was-- I asked this sailor, well, when are we going to get to Anzio? And he said that this is a pretty bad storm, but we would get there. And then he informed me that they were carrying high-octane gasoline and dynamite.

And we went to the ends up to Anzio and the harbor was packed with ships. And the silver barrage balloons overhead just blanketed the whole place. And they did not have any way to get us off of this thing for about 36 hours.

And during that time, we just had air raid after air raid. And some of these bombs, and planes and everything were just falling in the water all around us and the shells. And I didn't think I'd ever lived to get off that ship.

Then when we did get off of it, the men along the road would say, what are women doing here? This place is hot. Get out as fast as you can, and so forth and so on. We knew that we had sailed into a pretty dangerous place.

DAN OLSON: Schorer and the others had landed in the middle of one of World War II's bloodiest stalemates. Anzio's harbor, beach and all the roads were choked with ships and vehicles carrying supplies. Sirens blared as German warplanes dropped bombs. The attacks were non-stop day and night. Schorer says the Americans were pinned down by the Germans.

AVIS SCHORER: They would have troops up in the hill. And they'd have these gun emplacements and they could fire at our harbor, the Anzio harbor where our Navy was. The harbor was full of Navy ships and supply ships. And then the Navy would fire back over our heads towards the Germans.

LINDSEY BROWN: Conditions on the beach grew worse each day. The Germans sent the Anzio Express with its quarter-ton shells over our heads with increasing regularity. The enemy detected every move we made from their observation posts in the hills. Everything that moved was a target.

DAN OLSON: Avis Schorer's book is titled, A Half Acre of Hell, a phrase used by soldiers to describe the patch of ground occupied by the hospital. It was surrounded by military supplies targeted by German shells and bombs. The front was literally a few hundred yards away.

AVIS SCHORER: We were close enough to the front that if they weren't seriously wounded, they could walk to the hospital. And the soldiers would often beg to go back to the front because they had a foxhole. They did not feel safe in our hospital. And the title of my book, well, it wasn't exactly the title that I'd hoped I would come up with. Our hospital soon became hell's half acre.

DAN OLSON: The Allied standoff with German forces created tens of thousands of casualties on both sides. Surgeons worked around the clock. Shifts for nurses were 12, sometimes 24, even 36 hours. There were no days off. The wounds, Schorer writes in her book, were beyond description.

LINDSEY BROWN: The distinctive sweet smell of brain tissue, which I recalled from days in surgery, hung heavy in the air. The stench of blood was mingled with oily emissions from the electric motor on a suction machine. Propped in a sitting position, two soldiers shared the machine to clear secretions from their tracheotomies.

Many of the patients suffered wounds of the head and neck. Some had much of their face missing and others had abdominal wounds. A young soldier with a heavily-bandaged head cried for his mother.

Two with head injuries thought they were still in the battlefield fighting the Germans and cursed softly. Others lay quiet, making only the guttural sounds of the dying. It was clear that many would not have lived to reach the hospital if we had not been close to the front.

DAN OLSON: The furious and deadly standoff at Anzio between Allied and German forces continued with both sides throwing thousands more troops and supplies into the fray.

AVIS SCHORER: I'm sure there were tactical errors. That battle of Anzio will never be over. A lot of people felt that the troops should have moved inward because they had a great opportunity. Others thought they should stay there on the beach until they had more reinforcements.

And while they were contemplating whether to move inward or not, the Germans had time to move troops and surround the beachhead. And Hitler gave orders that those troops were to be wiped out at any price. And likewise, the Allies said that the beachhead would be held till the last man, if necessary.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview on Minnesota Public Radio with former Army nurse Avis Schorer. Steel fragments from the nonstop bombing and shelling ripped through the canvas walls of the hospital tents. Schorer learned to recognize the sound of approaching enemy aircraft even before the air raid sirens blared. Schorer writes, most of the air raids came at night.

LINDSEY BROWN: I ran to the air raid shelter and was just inside when planes dropped flares over the hospital. They lighted the whole area brighter than day. Planes made pass after pass over the hospital, unleashing a deadly load of anti-personnel bombs.

Jagged fragments of metal tore into the flesh of anyone near the explosions. Bombs screamed earthward and landed with a thud. Above the chaos and bedlam, someone shouted, they're falling on the nurses tents!

AVIS SCHORER: My friend from Des Moines was killed in an air raid when there was a dogfight overhead. And the British planes, I think, were chasing the German planes and the German plane in an effort to get away, dropped their bombs. They dropped it on the hospital. And everyone in the receiving-- in the intensive care ward was killed and my friend was one of them.

DAN OLSON: Schorer says her friend Ellen was the life of the party, a song leader, always making a joke. During air raids, she refused to go to the bomb shelters. A fragment from a bomb tore into her lung and damaged other organs. Schorer stayed by Ellen's bedside.

LINDSEY BROWN: Her breathing was shallow and her pale skin ashen. I tried to moisten her parched lips. She waved me away weakly. I could see her life slipping away.

She reached to remove the oxygen mask. Ellen, we'd better leave the mask on, I whispered. She rolled her eyes back and took her last breath.

AVIS SCHORER: We didn't have time to grieve. You had to go on. And I think that perhaps that might have been a good thing. We did not have time to grieve and so we just went on. We knew there was a desperate need for anything we could do.

DAN OLSON: Avis Schorer says desperation hung over the beachhead at Anzio. A huge German artillery piece continued to lob quarter-ton shells into the Allied position. Noiseless glider bombs exploded on the beach. Schorer says she was emotionally and physically exhausted.

AVIS SCHORER: Just unrelenting, the air raids and the shellings, day and night, days on end. And it certainly took its toll, and the number of casualties, and in morale. And no one wanted to quit, but we wondered, well, are we trapped here till we're killed? We didn't know, of course, what was going to happen to us.

LINDSEY BROWN: Some cried and others went silent. A condition called the Anzio shakes claimed many victims. Those affected shook uncontrollably during an air raid or shelling. A few days rest, warm clothing, and food usually returned the patient to normal.

DAN OLSON: Schorer says the unrelenting pace of treating the wounded kept many of the medical staff from focusing on the horror they were witnessing until after the battle.

AVIS SCHORER: We did have a few that had real serious emotional breakdowns, but it was shortly after we left the beachhead and they'd start recalling what they had been through. And I know of our doctors and one of the nurses had to be evacuated to the states. They had real emotional breakdowns.

DAN OLSON: Besides bombs and shells, the Allied forces at Anzio were the target of German propaganda. The sultry voiced Axis Sally beamed her radio broadcasts at the troops, trying to further demoralize them. Schorer writes that in April 1944, after two and a half months at Anzio, Axis Sally began one of her daily broadcasts with the words, happy days are here again for the 56th Evac.

You'll soon be leaving the beachhead. Schorer and the others couldn't imagine what she meant or where she got her information. Hours later, Schorer writes, she and the others learned that they were being replaced by the 38th Evacuation Hospital Group.

LINDSEY BROWN: Easter Sunday, April 9, dawned, dull and dreary. A soft rain fell. We packed a few personal items in our bags and sat on our bedrolls while we waited for the 38th. They arrived on time.

I envied their high spirit and fresh look. The strain of the past two months and a half showed in our group. Clothes hung on many who had lost weight.

We looked haggard and unkempt compared to the well-groomed and happy troops of the 38th. I was leaving some of my heart at Anzio. I turned my eyes toward the cemetery filled with marked graves. I said a prayerful farewell to Ellen, Gertrude, Rita, Nick and thousands of others who had lost their lives on the beachhead.

DAN OLSON: Schorer and the others had survived more than 500 air raids along with shellings day and night. They had cared for thousands who were wounded or sick. The tide of the war had turned against the Germans. Schorer and the others in the 56th set up their hospital unit in several other locations throughout Italy.

AVIS SCHORER: The trip up to Florence, very heavy fighting along the way to take the harbor at Leghorn and so forth. And to get across the Arno River in Florence was a big objective. And then the troops stalemated because they couldn't get over the Apennine Mountains.

So we spent seven months there, which is the longest we were any one particular place. And in the spring and they did get over the Apennines into the Po Valley. And by that time, it was very obvious that the German troops were disintegrating. They were giving up by the thousands.

And we set up a hospital in Mussolini Stadium in Bologna, and we had our last air raid there. Fortunately, they didn't hit us. We didn't think they had an air force left, but they did. Had one plane at least because they sent it over. And we thought, well, now we certainly will be starting home.

DAN OLSON: Rumors began flying by April 1945 that the end of the war was near. German troops were surrendering. Schorer writes that German ambulance drivers brought in wounded to their hospital and then turned themselves and their vehicles in at the unit's motor pool. German doctors, she says, worked alongside the 56th personnel caring for patients. Schorer says her hopes rose when shouts went through the camp, new orders had arrived.

AVIS SCHORER: We certainly will be starting home. But as usual, the Army has other ideas for you. So they were having some kind of a skirmish up on the Yugoslavian border and so we were sent up there much to our grave disappointment.

And while we were there, they taught us to fire pistols, and take them apart, and put them back together. Because, as I say, it was a rumor that since we'd had battlefield experience, we would be sent to Japan, but we'd get a leave at home first. And that was a pretty disheartening rumor.

And while we were there, they dropped the atomic bomb and then the war was over. But it took a long time to get home. I got home the last of October.

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LINDSEY BROWN: We heard American music that grew steadily louder as the ship moved along. We rushed to the starboard side. A small boat gaily decorated in red, white and blue bunting came into view. A lively combo of accordion, banjo and trumpet played "Sentimental Journey," "My Dreams are Getting Better All the Time," and "Beer Barrel Polka."

They waved and shouted, welcome back. We're glad you're home. My throat was tight and I could speak only in a whisper. Tears streamed without shame down every face on board the ship.

DAN OLSON: Why did you decide to write the book?

AVIS SCHORER: Well, I wasn't really thinking of anything except I had gone on a tour. And this lady was riding all the time and she said, well, she had taken a course in writing, and the name of the course was, So My Grandchildren Will Know Me. And I thought, well, that sounds like a good idea.

And so I decided, well, I would write about that part of my life because I really hadn't discussed it with anyone at that time. Like they say, veterans don't talk about what they did during the war. And so I took a few courses in writing.

I took one at the loft and a few through the extension at the university. And then I joined a writer's group and they encouraged me to go ahead and write the book. Now, it seems like people are terribly interested in World War II. And I never was aware of that interest until just lately.

DAN OLSON: Do you have grandchildren?

AVIS SCHORER: Yes, I have five.

DAN OLSON: Have they read the book?

AVIS SCHORER: Yes.

DAN OLSON: What did they think?

AVIS SCHORER: Well, there's still some of them are young. And I guess they think that it's great that their grandma could put the words together. I don't know. I don't know whether they actually the impact of the war because some of-- my grandchildren are quite young.

DAN OLSON: What do your children think?

AVIS SCHORER: Oh, they're very impressed. A lot of this they did not know.

DAN OLSON: In starting to write about it, did it pour forth or was it like trying to pull it out?

AVIS SCHORER: Yes. It seemed like once I started-- so many have said, well, how could you remember all those details? But I think any life-altering experience, you notice or you do remember it. I can remember some of those conversations just like they just happened.

DAN OLSON: There is among some people, perhaps some who didn't fight in World War II, an attempt to glorify the World War II effort and all of the battles. And, of course, there's an enormous amount of scholarship that goes with recounting as many details as possible. What are your thoughts on war and its reality?

AVIS SCHORER: Well, I just get a chill every time I hear someone say we'll take military action. I think there's got to be other ways to settle conflicts. And there's nothing great about a war. You think you come out the winner, but you don't. The price is too heavy, in my opinion.

DAN OLSON: Allied casualties at Anzio were 4,400 killed, more than half of them Americans, 18,000 were wounded, 6,800 taken prisoner or missing. Historians learned later, German combat losses were very similar to Allied losses. After the war, Avis Schorer married and had three children.

She became a nurse anesthetist, finishing her career at Lutheran Deaconess Hospital in Minneapolis. The 81-year-old Army veteran lives in Bloomington. Lindsey Brown read passages from Schorer's book, A Half Acre of Hell.

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You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. The death and destruction caused by World War II overshadow accounts of survival. Ken Porwoll survived one of the war's most brutal episodes, the Bataan Death March, and three years as a prisoner of the Japanese.

In a remarkable turn of events, his eventual rescue at the end of the war was aided by another Minnesotan. Porwoll sat in Saint Paul's Rice Park not long ago and described his ordeal. He was a 21 year old Brainerd area resident when he joined the National Guard. Before World War II began, Porwoll and other guard members from his home town were activated by the Army. They trained as part of an Army tank unit at Fort Lewis, Washington, in 1941 before they were sent overseas.

KEN PORWOLL: Before we left, I found out that we were going to the Philippines. And I thought, wow, isn't that great? I've been dreaming most of my life about going to the South Seas and spending some time. And here I'm getting a free trip. I'm going to get a free trip and how could it be better?

DAN OLSON: Porwoll and the others were at a base near Manila when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Within hours, Japanese bombers hit military targets in the Philippines. US forces suffered a string of setbacks at the beginning of the war.

Japan's invasion of the Philippines forced tens of thousands of American and Filipino troops to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula, where they were forced to fend off Japanese attackers. There was lots of finger pointing at the time. Why had orders to move the Allied forces to a safer haven been delayed? Why were they short of food and water? Whatever the reasons, the outcome was a disaster.

The US and Filipino forces ran low on provisions. The American general commanding the US forces on the Bataan Peninsula surrendered in early April 1942. By one account, it was the largest surrender of US military forces in the country's history. 75,000 troops, 65,000 of them Filipino and 10,000 Americans, including Porwoll, became prisoners of the Japanese. They began an eight-day forced March to an enemy garrison.

KEN PORWOLL: They lined us up and counted us off in groups of 100 and started you off down the road to the north. They wouldn't allow you to get water even when the water was available at the artesian wells. The people would go to get water, they'd shoot them. Or if a creek was running underneath, they might allow you to go to the creek and get water because it was polluted. There was maybe dead animals or people laying in the water and they knew that their job is being taken care of for them when they do that.

DAN OLSON: You're about 21. You had all of the optimism of youth on your side. Were you despairing at this point?

KEN PORWOLL: Oh, yes. Yeah, because some of the mind games they would play with us is that they would tempt you to go for water. And when you did, you got shot.

Or at one place, they had a pile of American food stacked up about two stories high. And when people went to that to get food, they killed them. They killed them right on the spot.

And another thing was they would take a man out of the ranks and start beating on him for some unknown reason, at least unknown to us. And then they found out that Americans would come out to help their buddies and so they did it more frequently. And then they killed all of them.

And it got to a point you really hated those Japanese soldiers to the extent that it showed in your face. And sometimes they would look at that angry face and pull you out and beat you because it was a sign of aggression. And that wasn't allowed with them.

And so then the next step was that you didn't go out to help. And then you begin to think about yourself as not worthy. And you're not the macho person you thought you were.

And you're not the big, hardy soldier, and then begin to hate yourself, just really down on yourself and say, oh, you're no good. But I had made a decision, I wanted to live. And I was going to do what it took to keep my life.

DAN OLSON: The broiling, tropical sun, hunger and thirst took a toll. Hundreds of sick or malnourished US and Filipino troops fell by the wayside. Porwoll recalls the anguish of leaving one of his friends behind.

KEN PORWOLL: On the second day when I'm walking along and I'm aware of four fellows next to me that I had gone to school with, and one I had gone to grade school with. And we all played on the same football, basketball teams. And so you weren't supposed to talk, but we managed to get the idea across that hang together. And if somebody gets a problem, maybe we can help them. There was at least 62 of us from Minnesota with the tanks down there, plus a number of others that were with the 31 Infantry, I believe.

But this particular moment was-- that day anyway, the biggest man in the group got a malaria attack. And at first, he got his chill and he was shaking and shaking. And even in the tropic sun, he felt like he was going to freeze.

And that sapped his strength. So that when they he hit the fever part, he really weakened. And we took turns shouldering him along, one on the other side and helping him.

But as the time wore on, he got worse. His weight became heavy. He was over 250 in weight. And somewhere along the line, after about two hours of this, the shouldering him, he said, look, guys, you're going to have to drop me in the ditch because you won't make it helping me. I'm too big.

And he knew when he said this that there were no stragglers left alive. They were all killed. And we said, no, let us help a little while longer. We agreed we would try to help.

The second time he made mention, he says, you're right, guy, we can't make it. We don't know if we can make it even without you until we agreed to let him go in the ditch. And I'm one of them helping him as we go to the side of the road.

And I'm apologizing and saying, Jim, I'm really sorry, just really sorry about this. I don't know what else to say. I'm really sorry.

And his last words to me is, don't worry, he says. I'll just have to find another way. And I thought, wow, he hadn't given up. He hadn't thrown in the towel yet he knew his odds were 200 against him.

But he still had a positive frame of mind about the thing. And so we let him go and we never looked back. We never spoke his name for the rest of the eight days it took us to make that walk.

DAN OLSON: Ken Porwoll says showing anger towards his Japanese captors meant a beating or death so he bottled up his anger.

KEN PORWOLL: The next person you got mad at was God. Where are you? What are you going to do about this? Why aren't you helping? Why are you allowing all this murdering to go on?

And you ended up alone. You didn't belong to the A company 194th any longer. You didn't have friends. And you didn't even have God to go to to say to help because you were-- it was tough. Just really, really a mind game the whole way.

DAN OLSON: When they reach their destination, the Americans were loaded into rail cars and sent to prison camps. There, thousands died from malnutrition, disease and beatings. By now, the Japanese had a plan. The survivors would be taken to Japan and used as slave laborers. Porwoll and the other Americans were jammed into ships.

KEN PORWOLL: It's terrible. It's terrible. It's beyond description. You're packed so tightly in the hull of the ship, you all can't sit down at the same time.

And there's no toilet facilities. The toilet facility is a washtub in the middle of the floor. Food is lowered down once a day on a rope because you're 20-foot down in this hole of the ship.

And the people that took it upon themselves to distribute the food and the water just had to be saints. You've got 350 starving men. Some of them are raving mad already by this time. And to see that each one gets his fair share of the allotment, that's their something.

And the human waste washing around in the place when the-- we went in October when it's stormy time. So they get protection from submarines is one of the things they're looking for. But it also was a rough sea voyage. And of course, the human waste got all over everybody.

And in the midst of this, a soldier comes down with appendicitis attack and he's screaming and screaming. And finally a doctor goes over to look at him and diagnosed it as appendix that's about to burst. And he says the man needs surgery or he's going to drive us all crazy.

So he got in contact with the ship's officers and asked for surgical equipment to do this. And the ship's captain sends down a jack knife, a needle and some button thread. And then the doctor says, I need light. It's dark down here.

They're dark, I can't see. So he lowered a 45-watt bulb on the end of an extension cord. And while seven men held the man down, the doctor took his appendix out, and sewed him up, and sent the equipment back up to the Japanese officer.

Two days later, the Japanese officer inquires about the health of the man who had surgery and he's told he lives. The officer sends down 2 pounds of sugar to give to the sick man. So two men are put in charge of the sugar to give this man a spoonful in the morning, at noon and in the evening. Then two men are put on those two men to watch them so they don't eat the sugar.

DAN OLSON: When Ken Porwoll and the other Americans reached Japan, they were put to work unloading coal.

KEN PORWOLL: Two winters. I went through two winters and we never had heat in the barracks. We never had warm water to wash.

My time that I left Philippines, that was in October of '43 until the spring of '44. I never washed. I never took my clothes off.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to the voices of Minnesota interview with World War II Bataan Death March survivor, Ken Porwoll, on Minnesota Public Radio. Life as a prisoner of war was tenuous at best. Food was scarce.

Disease was rampant. Beatings and executions continued. Porwoll says he had to find a way to cope with what he was enduring.

KEN PORWOLL: Let me go back a little bit to the death march again, being angry at God. And later on, I realized, hey, I'm still living and there are million guys who died. I said, God, you are paying attention. You are there.

And then six months later, I'm saying you're off to Europe again, God. You're not paying attention here in the Philippines and you're just letting things go to hell. And I said, jeez, I got to make it on my own.

And after a while, I would think, hey, you're not making it on your own, Ken. I said, thank you, Lord. Thank you for being there for me.

So I think it's that kind of a relationship that brought me to the final thing on that thing with God, if I can say that way. I'm in Japan and it's 1945. And I had been clobbered in the back by rifle butts to the effect that I have damage. I know I have. I hurt.

And this particular day my back muscle spasms and I can't walk or not very good. So when the work detail leaves, I decided I'm going to go on sick call and I start walking to that building. And I dropped to my knees because I can't walk. So then I crawled on my hands and knees until I can't do that anymore.

And my back muscles are crawling, and crawling and crawling. And so then I pull myself with my elbows until I get to the door and I pound on the door. And they come and pick me up and bring me inside.

And there is a doctor there from the British Army and a Japanese corpsman. And this day, he happened to be wearing hot boots, hobnail boots. Why? I don't know.

And as I lay on the floor with my muscle-- my back muscles squirming and twitching, and he is massaging me with his hobnail boots. And after about five minutes of this, he says, any guy that can act that good needs a day off, deserves a day off. So I'm put in the sick bay.

And after a few days, I'm recuperating, I'm feeling better, and I'm thinking about my plight. And I thought of all of the things that haven't happened to me, I hadn't been shot. I haven't had bones broken. I haven't had-- I hadn't been beat to a pulp or bayoneted. And I've always managed to find a mouthful of rice and a swallow of water.

And I says, God, you are here, aren't you? You've been here all the time. I say, thank you.

And I say, from now on, I won't worry whether I die or live because you're pulling the strings. And either way, I'm a winner. And that's what got me through the last four months of prison life.

DAN OLSON: One day in 1945, Porwoll says the prisoners were not forced to go to work. Their Japanese captors appeared to be in disarray. Porwoll says all the Americans could pick up from the guards was there had been two big events.

KEN PORWOLL: The Japanese commissioned officers disappear. Then the non-coms disappeared. And we decided that that, hey, the privates don't know what to do. They don't get orders.

So hundreds marched on the guard house and took their rifles away, and opened the gates and opened all the doors and all the buildings in the place. By the way, we found out later that the two big things were the two atomic bombs that went. We found one meal of rice in the storage house.

And when they broke into the headquarters office, they found the orders for our execution. And the means of the execution was left up to the camp commander. His other orders were to make it complete and leave no trace. And leave no trace.

DAN OLSON: The prisoners now had a new problem-- no one but the Japanese knew where they were. The Americans had to contact Allied forces. The first attempt failed. Two prisoners, emaciated and wearing little more than rags, were dispatched to Tokyo.

Ken Porwoll says they found US military police there, and what followed was a remarkable reunion of sorts with another Minnesotan.

KEN PORWOLL: We're American soldiers. We've been prisoners of war for three and a half years. Where the hell have you guys been?

So they took the men out to the battleship Missouri and were questioned and found to be truthful. And they were then turned over to Harold Stassen, who was Halsey's right-hand man, and who was the officer in charge of evacuation of American personnel. And so he says, show me on the map where you came from.

Look, he says there's an airport nearby. He says, let's go. They went to an aircraft carrier, got three airplanes and flew up. They come into our camp standing in the doorway of a big bus. And I recognized him. I recognized him as the governor of Minnesota.

And I tried to shout and I couldn't say anything. I tried to wave and I couldn't raise my arms. And as he stood in that bus and looked around at the people standing in their Japanese G-strings, and the buildings coming apart and the fires burning around the place with these pots on it, and he says this is really no place for Americans to be living. He says, I'm going to find help.

DAN OLSON: The next morning, Porwoll and others boarded a train for the trip that would eventually bring them home. Harold Stassen, top aide to the admiral in charge of the US Navy's Pacific forces, went on to oversee the liberation of other Americans held by the Japanese. By one count, 230,000 American prisoners died.

Porwoll and 150,000 others survived. Two post scripts, Jim was one of those left by the side of the road on the eight day Bataan Death March. Porwoll, you'll recall, was amazed at Jim's attitude that he said he'd find a way to survive.

KEN PORWOLL: And I thought that was a strange statement to make for a man that knew the odds are against him were such that you're not going to get over them. But eight days later, I end up in a barbed-wire compound in San Fernando. And the second morning I am there, I wake up at sunrise and I ache all over. So I roll to the other side to relieve the aching side I'm lying on. And I look into the eyes of Jim McComas, the guy we dropped in the ditch.

And I say, Jim, what are you doing here? He says the same thing you are, laying in the dirt. I said, no, no, I said, how did you get here? The same way you did. I walked every step of the way, he says.

I said, come on, Jim. I said, come on. I said, what happened to allow you to walk?

Well, he says, where I went into the ditch-- not where I put him, but where he went in the ditch-- there was a culvert about 4 feet ahead. And he crawled in the culvert, slept off his malaria attack and took a day rest. And then the second day, he joined another group of Americans when they come by.

DAN OLSON: The second post script-- one day at a veterans convention in 1985, Porwoll learned the fate of the man with the appendicitis attack in the hold of the Japanese ship, operated on and sewed up without anesthetic.

KEN PORWOLL: And we sat at the table. The man that had the appendix out was sitting at the table with his wife and his son. I could hardly believe it. I could hardly believe it.

But I say, how did you ever get out of that ship? I hardly got out of there on a 20-foot rope ladder. And I said, I struggled like crazy to get up.

I said, you didn't get up that ladder. No, he says, I didn't come up the ladder. He says there was about a dozen of us that couldn't make the ladder. So they lowered the cargo net and they lifted us out with the cargo net.

But I say, if you didn't work, you were on half rations in Niigata where we work in the coal yards. I said, how did you manage that? He says, they gave me a job as corpsman in the sick bay.

And what have you done since you come home from the war? He says, I've been a corpsman for the VA hospital all these years. He lived. He lived.

DAN OLSON: For years, Ken Porwoll declined to talk about his World War II experiences. Then he met Iris Chang, the author of the book, The Rape of Nanjing, an account of Japan's military atrocities on China's mainland during the war. She encouraged him to tell people his experiences.

KEN PORWOLL: And she convinced me that if you don't do it, the Japs aren't going to do it. And nobody else will do it and nobody else knows it. So if you don't do it, nobody else will. And I talked with her to some length when she was in Minneapolis with her book. And she convinced me, yeah, go do it, man.

DAN OLSON: Porwoll says he took Chang's advice, but he says he talks about his World War II experiences sparingly.

KEN PORWOLL: If I do it occasionally, fine. But if I do it too much, then I start getting nervous, start getting uptight, and all the other things, don't sleep at night and that sort of thing. So that, yeah, I have to limit the amount of time I spend thinking about it.

And I have noticed this, that people that are fellows that have written books and spent a year or a year and a half or more writing a book, they lose their balance. They lose really their sense of direction. It gets too much to carry.

DAN OLSON: Roseville resident Ken Porwoll, one of the Americans who survived the Bataan Death March and three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, that does it for our Midday program today on this 4th of July, independence day, the 225th birthday of the United states, 225 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. If you missed today's stories, the Voices of Minnesota, interviews with two Minnesotans who did more than their share to try to protect America's freedom, we'll be rebroadcasting this program at 9 o'clock tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio. 9 o'clock tonight, a rebroadcast.

And just a reminder, you can find a full week's worth of Middays always available on our website, minnesotapublicradio.org. So check that out if you'd like to hear these Voices of Minnesota interviews again. Maybe you'd like to hear the program from 11:00 this morning with the movie maven Stephanie Curtis. That's available on the website, full week's worth, all the time.

And one other note, we have a soapbox feature, an opportunity for you to express your opinion on some of the issues that are discussed on this program. Take advantage of it. This would be a great day to get your two cents worth in about freedom in America. Again, happy birthday and hope you can join us tomorrow on Midday.

SPEAKER: The museum experience, who's responsible for it? Who creates it. What are the rules and how are they enforced? On this week's Word of Mouth, we'll meet the behind-the-scenes players at a museum and talk to a few patrons as we wander from room to room this Friday night at 6:00.

GARY EICHTEN: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. Sunny skies, 76 degrees at KNOW FM 91.1, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Sunny and breezy through the afternoon, should hit 80 degrees yet today.

Clear and cool tonight for the fireworks with an overnight low in the low to mid 50s. Tomorrow, another nice day pretty much like today, sunny with a high 75 to 80. It's 1 o'clock.