(*Undated but after portion that mentions Second Republic in October, 1943)
This is plain unvarnished inferno, being completely cut off from the world. These Tokyo broadcasts! The German Hour at 1:30, that Tokyo Rose person, all the insidious propaganda of American prisoners broadcasting to their loved ones “To do anything, try anything to get a negotiated peace so that we may come home alive.” All this affects me, affects and embitters us all. Women are realists and have little concept of economics, which must be the real reason for wars. There must be a better way to settle problems than going to war, but no one seems to have discovered it. I’m no pacifist, however. If we must go to war, I am proud and pleased to see the way my country is handling it. But it does seem that a little judicious preparation before war was declared might have helped.
I get pretty tired of conversation around my house—chitchat about the childrens’ diet, bacteriological exami-
nation of feces, the last bridge hand, the high price of bakias, how so-and-so managed to keep his car, the
latest scandal both inside and out of camp, and so on, ad nauseum. I am even driven to listening to comedy
programs on the radio. Fancy jeopardizing one’s life just to laugh at Bob Hope saying, “I’ve been in Africa
shooting craps with the black boys.” Stooge asks: “Zulus?’ Hope: “No, I won six-fifty.”” Shows what desperation will do. I even listen to a London One Man’s Family In War-Torn London serial at five a.m.!
The Jap newspaper had a likely story the other day. Told of a Japanese ace shooting down two American
planes with rice cakes, having run out of ammunition. I made a cake today out of cassava flour that I bet even
money would bring down ten Zeros without much effort, provided I could hit them.
Life goes on, war or no war. Eternal triangles flourish. Some of the civilian prisoners from the Southern Islands
were brought into Santo Tomas the other day, only to find their wives (a couple of them), interned here, “shacked up” (correct term for sharing a shack) differently. Even the camp at Los Banos, which started out to
be strictly bachelor, has become co-ed. Even the Japs couldn’t resist the pleas of the girls left behind, and so
Los Banos is no longer so peaceful, they say.