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Baxter 8
university. Met at the boat upon arrival at Yokohama, he was immediately drafted into the Japanese army. He was, whenever possible, good to the prisoners, at times giving them news of the war and always insisting that the Japanese would lose.
After a short period of time Camp 5B at Niigata, with the above cast of characters in charge, soon acquired the reputation of being a "horror camp."
HOUSING AND CAMP FACILITIES
When the camp was opened on September 3, 1943, conditions were abysmal. Housing for the initial 300 P.O.W.'s consisted of a single two-story wooden building with a small yard. One outdoor pump provided the water supply with no other washing facility. The outdoor toilet, or benjo, at one end of the barracks was totally inadequate for the number of men, most of whom suffered from chronic dysentery.	A small hut in	the	yard served as a cook shack. The barracks
consisted of	about ten large rooms	separated from each other by paper-thin walls
and connected by a narrow hall running down one side of the structure. About thirty or more P.O.W.'s were crammed into each room, a scant three-by-six-foot space available for each man's cotton blanket and hard little pillow. One room was designated as a hospital ward, but actually it was used for the dead and dying.
Originally intended as only a temporary camp until construction of a permanent facility was completed, the complex remained in use almost four months or until Christmas Eve, 1943. On that date the approximately 550 P.O.W.'s were transferred to a new, partially completed camp which was in even worse condition than the abandoned camp. The clapboard buildings still lacked windows, and the openings had been roughly boarded up, leaving large uneven cracks for rain, snow, and the cold	winter	winds to enter	the	unheated barracks. No kitchen had been
built. What	little	food there was	was	cooked about two miles away, and after