<img src="http://www.joplinglobeonline.com/images/zope/extra.gif" border=0> Surviving Los Banos <font color="#ff0000"> w/ Photo slide show & Brad Baker interview </font>

By Carol Stark

cstark@joplinglobe.com

Japanese guards were out early in the prison yard on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945. For days they had been receiving warnings that American troops were closing in.

The guards had orders that morning to kill the 2,200 civilian prisoners of war at the internment camp at Los Banos outside of Manila in the Philippines.

They were to bring the prisoners out for the usual 7 a.m. roll call, and then mow them down with the machine guns they had hidden underneath a tarp in the prison yard just a few days before.

At least that was the plan.

Click on 'Captions" to read more about the story

Shortly before the roll call, Norma Saunders stood on the steps of her prison barracks next to her mother. They could see planes overhead, and bundles came out of the planes heading toward the field just outside of the camp.

At first they thought it was just another errant drop of relief supplies from the Red Cross, much like those that had been attempted several times in the past couple of weeks by Allied forces. Then Norma’s mother looked up: “There are men at the end of those parachutes,” she told her daughter.

As soon as the first chute opened, small-arms fire broke out. Most of the prisoners fled back into the barracks, but 18-year-old Norma stayed on the steps. She heard the crack of a rifle followed by the sound of a bullet whizzing past her head. She looked to the left where the rifle shot came from and saw one of the Japanese guards aiming his rifle squarely at her.

Just then she heard another shot from another direction and the Japanese guard dropped dead.

She looked in the direction of the second shot and there stood “the meanest-looking person, and the best-looking person I have ever seen.”

He was a Filipino guerrilla, naked except for a loin cloth, hair down to the middle of his back, holding a rifle, with bandoliers of ammo strung across his chest and a machete.

He smiled at Norma and then disappeared around the corner of the building.

Even though he has recounted his mother’s story many times, Bret Baker’s voice catches a little when he gets to the part about the bullet being fired.

After all, Bret says, if it hadn’t been for that Filipino guerrilla, neither he nor his three brothers — Bruce, Brad and Kurt — would ever have been born.

Keeping that somber thought in mind, the brothers and their families will gather — just as they do every year — to celebrate the Feb. 23 liberation of the civilian prisoners from Los Banos, and to celebrate the fact that this young girl who would later become their mother had survived one of the horrific atrocities committed against civilians during World War II.

‘Angels dropping from heaven’

Webb City residents most likely have heard many stories about the Bakers’ father, Robert “Bob” Baker, who served as a forward observer for the 79th Infantry Division fighting in Europe. He was awarded the Bronze Star with one oak leaf cluster for his action in eastern France. Baker, a former Webb City councilman and mayor, spoke often to civic groups, high-school students and at gatherings of veterans, retelling the story of the liberation of Paris and eastern France.

But his wife, Norma, while open with friends and family about spending her teen years as a civilian prisoner of war, rarely told her story publicly.

“Mom could talk about it, and often would with her family,” said Brad Baker, 52, who now lives in the Baker home in Webb City where he and his brothers grew up.

“But, if she knew ahead of time that someone wanted to come and talk to her, or if someone wanted her to speak about it, well she would start thinking about the experience to the point that it became too traumatic,” Brad said.

There was no shortage of courage and valor in the Baker home, but the brothers said it wasn’t until later in their lives that they realized their parents’ experiences went beyond the norm.

For instance, Bob would always send his wife flowers on Feb. 23 to mark the day she regained her freedom. But, they came along with a figure of a soldier and a homemade parachute bearing the insignia of the 11th Airborne. In notes kept by the brothers, the paratroopers are referenced as “angels from heaven.”

The Bakers’ mother died in 1998, at the age of 71, and six years later — in 2004 — their father, 83, died.

But the brothers have kept the stories and the mementoes, like that soldier figure with the parachute attached. He’ll have a special place at the dinner table.

“Keeping Mom’s story alive is incredibly important,” said Kurt, 49, of Willard.

“You’ve got to remember on the same day she was liberated, something else pretty big was going on that day far away from Los Banos,” Kurt said.

Feb. 23, 1945, marked the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima.

Starting at the beginning

Bret, 58, the oldest of the brothers, falls naturally into his role of family spokesman. He, Brad and Bruce, 56, of Claremore, Okla., sit around the kitchen table. Kurt will join them during another meeting to discuss their mother’s story.

“Maybe the best way to start is to tell you how my mother came to be in the Philippines,” said Bret.

It was 1939 and Frank Saunders Sr. was working in a textile mill in Salem, Mass. His wife, Emma, worked as a part-time police matron, but the money wasn’t enough to raise their three children: Dorothy, 18; Norma, 13; and Frank Jr., 8, who was nicknamed “Buddy.”

Saunders saw an ad for textile workers in the Philippines. It was a chance, Saunders believed, for his family to get back on its feet.

And, at least for a while, he was right. The new home in Manila, by accounts recorded by the family, was much more spacious than the one they had lived in at Salem. They even had a houseboy, Juan “Johnny” Inobana, who has remained a friend to the Bakers through the years.

Dorothy Saunders married a U.S. Army Captain from Kansas City in 1940, and after the wedding he was ordered back to the states. She had already left well before the Japanese began bombing outside of Manila just hours after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

On Jan. 2, 1942, the Japanese captured Manila.

“They came to their house and told my grandparents to pack up enough belongings for three days. They were to take what they could carry,” said Bret.

“They had no way of knowing those would be their only belongings for the next three years,” he said.

The civilians were loaded up and taken to Santo Tomas University, which later would be known as the Santo Tomas Internment Camp.

“Our mother told us later that she had been excited because she was going to turn 16 in a POW camp,” said Brad. “She had no idea how long she would be a prisoner.”

The POWs lived in the classrooms and classes were even held.

The prisoners at Santo Tomas negotiated with the Japanese and a group of volunteers offered to build a camp where families could be together. Norma Saunders’ family members wanted on that list so they could be together and perhaps even grow some of their own food by planting seeds that their houseboy Johnny had been slipping to them through the prison fence.

The family moved to the barracks camp at Los Banos in July of 1944.

A cup of rice

Notes kept by the brothers document their mother’s description of life at the camp.

Initially, prisoners received three meals a day, later two, later one meal, and in the last few days they were getting no food at all.

Emma Saunders was failing fast. Bret said she was in ill health because, near the end, she was giving most of her daily allotment of food — a cup of rice — to her children. Prisoners scavenged for food, and deaths were tallied each day.

Oddly enough, Kurt said it was dreams of food that kept some of the prisoners from giving up.

“You know what Mom said they would do to pass the time? They would sit around and discuss recipes, sometimes writing recipes down in great detail,” Kurt said.

But, the discussions were sometimes darker, and the POWs would also talk about what they would do to get even.

A camera hidden in the deep pocket of Norma’s father’s robe was used to provide information to an underground network outside the prison camp. It was Norma who would smuggle film out of the camp.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, U.S. commander in the Philippines, sent out orders to liberate camps in the area as quickly as possible. The Japanese had set to digging trenches for mass burials and it seemed likely that the prisoners would be slaughtered if rescues were not successful.

A plan was developed to free those at Los Banos involving a carefully timed attack. As the jump planes passed over the camp, Japanese sentries were changing the guard. The guards, who had turned out without weapons for their morning calisthenics, were killed. Others fled into the hills.

The paratroopers found the starved prisoners, many of them weighing barely 100 pounds.

Among them were Norma Saunders, her mother and father, and her brother Buddy. Frank Saunders Sr. weighed only 76 pounds when he was rescued, according to notes kept by the brothers.

Bruce Baker said his mother’s stories about starvation drove home the cruelty she and her family suffered.

“What she described were people who were so numb to horror, that they were just barely living. Just surviving one day to the next and watching while those next to them died,” Bruce said.

“When they came to rescue them, most of the prisoners couldn’t walk out of the camp. They had to be carried to trucks that would then take them on to safety. The whole time there was the fear that the Japanese would return,” he said.

Amtracs, military amphibious vehicles, were waiting on the shore of Laguna de Bay, about a mile and a half away from the camp.

Those rescued would be hospitalized for nearly 30 days before they were able to eat real food again.

One of the photos the brothers cherish shows their mother seated on a truck that’s pulling away from Los Banos.

But, no matter how far away she traveled, the memories would always haunt her, her sons say.

Better times

While in the camp, Norma’s mother had developed cancer. Her dream was to stay alive long enough to put her feet on American soil. She realized that dream, and by May she was back in the United States. She died two months later.

Frank Saunders Sr. went on to launch a mop factory in Atchison, Kan., at the age of 63. He built it into the world’s largest mop factory. It is still in operation today, part of Golden Star, Inc.

Norma Saunders would meet Bob Baker in Kansas City. He proposed to her on Valentine’s Day of 1948 and they were married in June.

Kurt, in a series of notes provided for the Globe interview, describes his mother’s story as one with “a happy ending.”

The Bakers have attended a number of reunions with the prisoners of Los Banos over the years, and while Norma could never forgive the Japanese for their treatment of the civilian prisoners, she remained forever in love with the Philippines. So much so that the Baker home was decorated true to the style of a Filipino home.

And carefully displayed on a shelf in the dining room is a set of what appear to be wooden cups. Like many things owned by the Bakers, they too have a story.

“When our family was at Santa Tomas, their home was looted and burned,” said Bret. “But Johnny, the family’s houseboy, came to see them and was so excited, because he had been able to save something for them.”

Bret said his mother told them her family tried to guess what it would be. She had hoped that it would be one of her dolls. Her brother wanted his toy soldiers and her mother had hopes he had saved some photos.

Instead, Johnny had saved a set of wooden Filipino beer mugs.

“They are as precious as anything we own,” said Bret.

“They are a part of Mom’s story.”

Carol Stark is the editor of The Joplin Globe

Making contact

If you would like to contact members of the Baker family about the liberation of Los Banos you may e-mail them at pow@mobakers.com.

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