A World War II diary casts new light on Tehran
At a concentration camp in the Philippines, American civilian prisoners and their Japanese captors held a party in 1942 for some departing guards, sharing sukiyaki and singing Auld Lang Syne. "They really liked each other," Prisoner Natalie Crouter wrote in her diary. "The pity of it—that our enemies should tell us this—that prisoners in a prison camp have given them more fun and friendliness than they ever had before. How it lights up the poverty, the barrenness of their past . . ." For one night, she wrote, the Americans and Japanese "were just boys again, sorry for the mess we are mixed in together."
At the time, the Tokyo press was shrieking about "white devils," and Hollywood was churning out propaganda movies depicting Japanese as bloodthirsty primitives. But for the diarist, now 81 and living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the fact that Japanese and Americans were getting along at the camp was perfectly normal. A flinty, no-nonsense New Englander who once worked in the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti, Crouter viewed World War II as a tiresome family quarrel, and not a fit activity for respectable adults. Her book (Forbidden Diary, $14.95, to be published next month by Burt Franklin & Co.) is remarkable for the interplay it creates between that view and the delicate Japanese-American minuet at the camp. In some ways, the book also sheds light on the ordeals of today's hostages in Tehran and Bogota.
Crouter was a housewife in Manila when the Japanese invaded the Philippines in December 1941. She, her husband Jerry, an owner of a gas station and an insurance agency, and their two children, aged twelve and ten, were interned for three years at Camp Holmes, a former police barracks in the mountains near Baguio. As prisoners, they were far better off than captured GIs. The mountain site offered healthfully low temperatures and country-club scenery, and for most of the war was not even enclosed by a fence. Prisoners ate as well as guards, and the Japanese carefully protected Red Cross shipments from the wiles of looters and grafters. With approval of their captors, some 500 inmates organized the camp, setting up an adult education program that offered lessons in nine languages including Japanese—taught, of course, by guards. The Americans mixed easily with their captors and were even allowed to own knives and bows and arrows.
Still, no prisoner could forget his real status. The Japanese did not permit mail in or out, and the penalty for being caught with a radio was death. (The inmates listened anyway, without getting caught, and heard the "news" that the Japanese had bombed Seattle and invaded Missouri.) Though cruelty was rare, a Baptist missionary, aged 26, was killed, apparently because the Japanese considered him a spy for China, and two men who tried to escape were tortured but allowed to live.