Well the order came from above. By that point Commander Sackett was the commander of the
Mariveles area, so he gave the orders. The fellow that actually carried out the scuttling
was a Lieutenant Commander Al Hede, who was the 1st Lieutenant. So the decision was made
to scuttle her because she was still a valuable ship at that point because she could produce
lots of little parts and pieces and she was actually doing a lot of work for the Army,
like supporting and also construction work that was going on. She was making parts for
bulldozers, for tanks. She was making stretchers to take care of casualties. She was a very
valuable ship. They literally opened everything up that could be opened up. The men went to
work with sledgehammers on the equipment, the delicate optics and what not. They took
out the breech blocks of the guns and threw them over the side. There were four torpedoes
left in the magazine and they wrecked them so they couldn’t be used. And so eventually
everything that was done to sink the ship was done. She was backed out under her own
power, she wasn’t towed. She was underway until the very end. The Canopus was out in
the middle of the Mariveles Harbor going down. I was with the Signal, 228 Signal Operation
Battalion on Bataan, Army outfit. My last order I got from the Army was, “You are
on your own. Bataan is being surrendered. ” The boats were gone. The crew was gone.
They had already left and gone to Corregidor. Me and three other guys, we formed up and
we found some floating material and we swam over to Corregidor about a mile away. We were
fortunate, I think, we caught the tide right. We got to Corregidor, the Marines over there
said, telling us, “Go back to Bataan, you haven’t got anything to eat over there anyway.”
But they finally let us aboard, and we went back with the Canopus crew up on Geary Trail,
on Corregidor and they formed what they called the Navy Battalion. They were sending people
to various units and various smaller ships within the Inshore Patrol operating out of
Corregidor and Mariveles. So she was serving as sort of a personnel pool, the largest amount
of men went to the 4th Marines Regiment, which had been pulled out of China just before Pearl
Harbor in like late November and they were originally on Bataan and went to Corregidor
to man the beach defenses. The Marines sent a couple of sergeants to try to teach us how
to be infantryman. The time on Corregidor, we were there about 30 days, approximately;
From April 9 until May 6. The Japanese landed on Corregidor the night of May 5. The Navy
Battalion went out and fought them with the Marines and the Army. General Wainwright surrendered
Corregidor and all the rest of the Philippines on May 6, 1942. We were ordered to lay down
our arms; the war was over for us. And that was all of the Canopus at that point in time.
She was on the bottom of the ocean. They finally says, “We’re taking you out.” We were
put on a boat and taken to Manila. We were marched from the docks to the railroad station
in Manila. The Filipinos were all on the sidewalks trying to give us something, helping us if
they could. We were loaded in and taken to Cabanatuan number three. I was there from,
only a few days, really. I was called out of Cabanatuan by name, rank and serial number.
We were 1500 all told, but they called us out one after another and loaded us on the
Tottori Maru, a Japanese troop ship. There were 1500 Americans and 1500 Japanese soldiers
on it. We went from Manila to Formosa; stopped there. We went out and headed out and we were
fired on by an American submarine. It fired three torpedoes. One of them broached and
the routine on the ship was half of the 1500 Americans were below deck and the other half
were on top, up on the deck. But we hollered, we said, “The torpedo broached.” Then
the commanding officer of the Tottori Maru swung the ship just enough one torpedo passed
on one side, the other passed on the other side. Both of them missed. They took us off,
up on the dock and washed us down with firehouses. We went out again; submarines were sighted.
We went back in. This time they took the Japanese soldiers off and went from there over to the
shallow waters of China on up to Pusan, Korea, I think it was. Loaded on the train and then
taken on up to Mukden. More than 27,000 Americans were held captive in the Pacific Theater during
World War II. Nearly half didn’t make it home.