Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with John W. Hanback
November 17, 2010
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood
Clip 3
Rhonda Haygood: Was it hard being in close quarters—with that many men in such a small area? Did you get along well?
John Hanback: Oh, we got along all right, yeah. We, we, like I said, we, we got along real good.
RH: Um-hm.
JH: Course there was thirty-three NCOs, non-commissioned officers and they kept us in a separate building from what they did the lower grade people. They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t let us stay with them cause we had too much authority over them; they’d do anything we told them not to do—or to do, you know.
RH: Oh.
JH: And, and they didn’t like that so they’d keep us non-commissioned officers in one place and then the, we had about seventeen or eighteen officers and they kept them in another place so they, they couldn’t tell us, you know, “You can’t do that”, “You better not do that”, you know, stuff like that.
RH: Right. Well, did they let you go outside and get exercise—
JH: Oh, yeah.
RH: —in the yards and stuff?
JH: Oh, you’d get all the exercise you want. They had big, what do they call them, courtyards you know, like basketball courts, you know. You’d go out there and run and jump and down. They, they played a lot of basketball, and soccer, stuff like that. They, they was, they’re pretty good people about wanting, wanting to play sports. Course, they enjoyed watching the Americans play cause we played a lot different than what they do, you know. They, ah, they, they really enjoyed that.
RH: Did you notice any of, any of the ones that were, that had you captive, did any of them show any particular sympathy for you, ah, try to befriend you at all or—
JH: No. Everybody’s treated the same. You eat the same, you eat the same amount, you went to bed at the same time, you got up at the same time. That was, that was the way, the way it was.
RH: What about communicating with your family back home. JH: I never had no communication with them till about, I don’t know, maybe three months before I got out. I finally picked up enough nerve and wrote her a letter and I wouldn’t use the address that they had on there, but they went ahead and passed it on, so she got it, about, oh, two or three months before I got out, she got the letter; she’s still got it.
RH: Does she?
JH: Yeah.
RH: Aww. Well what did the, what did they tell her after you had been captured, what did they tell her about where you were?
JH: Nothing. The United States government just give her a, a letter stating that I was missing in action. That’s all, that’s all she knew. She knew nothing else.
RH: Um-hm.
JH: And there was nothing that, really nothing else to tell, you know. There was a lot of them that way. A lot of these guys went on and wrote home and used that address that I didn’t like and their folks got letters from them and they’d, they’d write letters back and use that Chinese address, they’d get the letter. Of course, the Chinese they read all the mail went out and in, that, ah, anything in there they didn’t want they’d mark it out or cut it out. Cause that one letter that I wrote her, I made two or three remarks about something and they cut it out before they would mail it on out.
RH: Where was she when you got captured?
JH: She was in Japan with me. Yeah. She was in Japan. They loaded her and our daughter up and put them on an airplane and sent them back to the States.
RH: Did they?
JH: Or sent them to California, [unintelligible] to San Francisco. There she had to ride the train from there along up to Florence here.
RH: Um-hm.
JH: She, they, she didn’t stay over there but about two or three weeks, or less, till they got her out of there. They got all dependents out; they didn’t want no dependents over there after that cause there was no—where we went was a camp called Camp Hakata on the southern tip of Japan, Kyushu Island, the Island of Kyushu. And, they was expecting the North Koreans to hit that place, because that’s where we had all the military stuff at. They had a airbase there and artillery and all. They had, had the big stuff there; they’s look—, looking for them to hit it. Cause it’s ninety miles from Pusan over there, where we was at. And they could get there just over night, you know, if they wanted to come.
