After the first printing, Jeanette Babler, Ed’s widow, pointed out to me that the actual writing of his memoirs seemed to help relieve Ed’s sometimes nearly overwhelming tensions that would build up upon remembering his ordeal, even decades after it ended. She conveyed to me that he would sometimes write portions of these memoirs after recalling upsetting memories; at other times he would just sit and write, recalling the memories as he did so. Usually, as she stated, he did so in a very upset manner, but his writing would always seem to calm him down.
Although very therapeutic in nature for Ed, this also resulted in many of his sentences being of nearly bullet type in format with various subjects sometimes intermingling. Some of these were in order, some were scattered over several pages: a sentence here, another there, and yet another several paragraphs or even pages later. This made it somewhat difficult to properly put the items into correct context and order, especially since Ed had passed away several years before my writing of this book and was not available for consultation.
As I alluded to at the end of the Forward in the original printing (which remains intact in this second edition), in formatting this edition I fully attempted to maintain Ed’s story, whenever possible, using Ed’s own words when I could adequately place them in proper sentence structure with little or no grammatical change. When I could not, I took the liberty to reword them, but took great strides to insure that the context remained in tact. In addition, since it was and remains Ed’s story, I chose to write in the first person format.
In this second edition, in an attempt to do a better service to Ed and his fellow POWs, I have incorporated several minor typographical, punctuation, and grammatical error changes that were discovered after the initial printing. I have also chosen to change from using content footnotes for the insertion of clarification and corroborating information to incorporating these into the text in the form of encapsulated brackets where deemed necessary to give the reader a better understanding of the overall picture of the war in relation to what Ed was experiencing. In some instances I have also expanded upon some of this clarification and corroborating information. The remaining footnotes have been changed to endnotes and contain, for the most part, only reference material. I feel this will make for a smother flow for the reader.
In addition, since the original printing it has come to my attention that two POW camps in the Japanese home islands were both referred to as the or an Omine camp, which has led to some confusion, even for those who actually lived at the camps. Ed repeatedly used the name Omine Machi in his memoirs when referring to the camp that he was incarcerated in while in Japan. Therefore, in the initial printing I indicated that he was at the Omine-machi camp, which I related to as the Hiroshima #6 camp on the Island of Honshu. However, in gaining access to some of the various camp rosters, it was discovered that Ed was actually in the Fukuoka Camp 05B-Omine on the Island of Kyushu. For this mistake, I humbly apologize and have made the appropriate corrections properly referencing the Fukuoka Camp in the applicable map that I include within these pages. All other content in this second edition remains the same as the original printing, with the exception of the already noted minor editing corrections.
In writing this book, I hope that I have done an adequate job that does justice to not only Ed, but to all of those who suffered throughout such an ordeal. I believe that the result is, at the very least, close to what Ed had endured and the timeline that he endured it, and that he would be pleased with what’s written in these pages. With this said, any incorrect statements, miss-quotes, or misspellings of personal or place names remains solely my responsibility, and I sincerely apologize in advance for any errors.
Robert C. Daniels