Getting into Frank's car I notice the back seat is filled with merchandise from a recent shopping spree. At eighty years old, Frank Corbi is an expert bargain hunter. His other skills are those of mechanic, pilot, and survivor of the Bataan Death March. I'm armed with my tape recorder and a list of questions, hoping to incorporate Frank's POW experiences in a book.

He smiles and lets me know that everything is from Sam's Club. I glimpse a miniature compressor, packets of batteries and pens, cans of coffee and tuna. There are only a couple of filled bags, the rest is strewn across the backseat. He tells me to jump in.

"It's like Christmas there," he says. "I can't help it. I see all this stuff, all the good deals, and I've got to have it."

I worked for Frank and his son through most of the eighties at Miller Field, a small airport near Alliance, Ohio. During my years there as an instructor I watched others become more upset over the Death March than the survivor himself. One man at the airport restaurant became so irate that Frank had to talk him down from his intense anger, saying that although some of his captors were truly sadistic, others were ashamed of their actions.

Before visiting Frank, I reviewed Japan's attack on the Philippines, the day after Pearl Harbor. After four months of fighting, General King, commander of the American-Filipino Forces on Bataan, surrendered in April of 1942. His men were malnourished and suffering from disease and injuries without adequate medical supplies.

After King's surrender, the Americans continued to occupy Corregidor, the island guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. In order for the Japanese to make their assault on Corregidor, they had to remove the prisoners from the Bataan peninsula. The march out of Bataan and the subsequent imprisonment began as a logistics problem for the Japanese and ended in a nightmare that took the lives of nearly 7,000 Americans by the end of the war. The March started with 10,000 U.S. soldiers.

I turn on my tape recorder as Frank starts answering my questions. He confirms the many reports of men bayoneted and shot if they straggled to the back of the line or off the road during the march from the southern tip of Bataan to Camp O'Donnell. The Japanese allowed them to rest in front of artesian wells but killed anyone who made a dash for the water.

As Frank names possible restaurants, he corroborates my latest data on the Death March. We stop by an Italian restaurant that is closed, and Frank mentions we're near where he grew up.

This side of town is depressed and shabby; the homes look neglected. Winter tips into spring. Dull grass, trees that have been bare and lifeless for months, remind me of another spring afternoon at Miller Field, helping Frank check the engine compression on a Cessna Skyhawk. The hangar door was open and Frank started talking about all the preparations people made for winter but did practically nothing for spring. High winds, floods, and lightning eliminated people with great efficiency, he said.

Frank turns onto North Liberty, the street where he was born in 1919 and would live until enlisting in the service. He points to a shed in the backyard of his old house. "I used that little building for developing pictures." He maintains his love of photography with a laboratory of video and computer equipment in his basement, where he edits wedding pictures or transforms eight-millimeter home movies into video with sound. A guy like Frank could have been born on a street called Lady Luck.

I ask Frank what his knack for survival is.

"Well, at the time, probably my age. If you were too young or too old you died more easily. The older guys had wives and children and the youngest had left home for the first time - a terrible fix to be in. Myself, I was old enough to be away from my family without dying of heartache, but not old enough to have a family. Then, I had some luck, too." Frank raises his right hand off the steering wheel and shows me the ring.

The story behind the ring is a recent one, and it's an aspect of Frank that drives his son crazy. Understandably, Alan wants to know the experiences his father has lived through and can't accept that decades must pass before his dad is inclined to say anything. The ring story surfaced accidentally, last summer.

"You didn't want to hide anything from them, so I took my ring off and strung it with my dog tags, keeping it outside my shirt," Frank says. This ring from his parents bears their first-name initials on the inside of the rose-gold band. The engraved letters overlap.

In the strip searches following the American's surrender, the Japanese were eager to punish the souvenir-takers (those who had taken articles off dead Japanese soldiers) and seize the usual valuables: jewelry and money. The night before, I read of an American wrestling to get his wedding ring off his finger while his impatient captor reached for his sword. The man took a swipe of blood from another American who was bleeding, lubricated his finger and wiggled the ring free.

Frank stood in line while a Japanese sergeant grabbed watches, rings and money. Waiting his turn to be accosted, Frank watched a Japanese officer approach the sergeant. A rough command from the officer stopped the soldier from plucking his ring. Frank believed that the officer had seen something in him. "I didn't want to lose that ring. And he must have seen that in my face." Throughout his imprisonment, no one ever tried to snatch it from him again.

After General King surrendered his forces, Frank Corbi had a trek of about one hundred miles from the southern tip of Bataan to Camp O'Donnell. I ask him about rumors of MacArthur's return. Of course there were plenty of them and, for a while, he says, they lent hope. In Donald Knox's "Death March," the author mentions a rumor circulated during the fight for Bataan that a Black Cavalry had landed in Manila to rescue the men. Frank ponders my information then shakes his head. "That's nice, but I never heard that story."

Frank asks if I'd like to drive past the old Taylorcraft plant where he briefly worked after the war. He guides the car along the city limits where older homes and empty lots transition into forest. Usually, Frank isn't prone to talk about his experiences, believing the details of his imprisonment are personal matters of little interest to others. But at eighty, with many of his friends gone, there's a desire to make sense of a long life. A sandpaper company now occupies the long, narrow buildings. Woods and fields surround the business. Frank drives up to the spot where a new aircraft would get its final check before the test pilot took the controls. Both of us get out of the car and Frank points to where the runways were located.

"You know, I first saw my wife here. Her group built the wing, starting with just the spar. Another group covered them." Frank looks from the sky to the buildings and smiles. "Aggie worked at a restaurant in town as well, that's where I started talking to her. I was pretty timid at first, so I'd just come in and buy a pack of smokes then leave. We didn't date very long. I had hot pants. Well, that's what we used to call it."

We get back in the car and drive to his favorite diner. Food has always been a focal point in my friendship with Frank Corbi. Over breakfast or a piece of pie, we could voyage through the past, not only Bataan, but his many years in aviation.

After a few months in captivity, Frank and the other men turned their conversations from sex and freedom to the talk of food - all the different foods they'd eat once at home. "You know, I kept a little journal of all the dishes we'd make for ourselves someday. There was picnic food, holiday food and the three squares."

I turn the tape recorder back on and ask Frank about his fish heads and rice diet.

"We didn't have it all the time, but when we did, it gave me strength. You know someone who wants to go on a diet? Put them on fish heads and rice for three months. They'll lose weight and stay healthy." Frank smooths his napkin then adds, "Sometimes during the march, they'd let us rest alongside the road and there'd be a little bush with flowers. When we got up to leave, every flower was eaten off that bush."

Flowers are usually abundant in vitamin C, great for the immune system, and possibly an early contributor to Frank's remarkable health. But Frank reminds me that at the prison camp, Cabanatuan, he contracted both malaria and dysentery during his internment. What saved him from dying of malaria was the quinine acquired by the medics. The Japanese found the medicine bitter and disagreeable.

When a mound of home-fries smacks the hot grill, Frank glances at the cook then resumes talking.

"Now, if you're already healthy, and have a good immune system, your best chance to maintain your health is with as little medicine as possible. You see, I believe medicine can make your body lazy, dependent. That little bit of quinine was a miracle, but I had other things go wrong with me, and no other medicine to depend upon."

His toughest hours were aboard the notorious "Hell Ships" bound for the Japanese mainland. Like many others, Frank hustled to stay alive in camp where there was some room to maneuver, using one's wits and skills. But the cargo hold of his first ship was filled with men standing erect, shoulder-to-shoulder, front to back. Even managing a breath might depend on a man's height. Frank says the afternoon before their departure the temperature was well over a hundred degrees. "Imagine that heat, then thrown into a hole of a steel ship." This first Hell Ship was the Oryoku Maru.

Frank pauses before digging into his scrambled eggs. "Some men would just go crazy down there, and there was nothing to do but kill them. Of course, our big problem was no water, and this made the men do terrible things. Some tried to drink blood."

In the camps, one could imagine how a man might live with hope. But the condition of men pressed into a hot, dark cargo hold, standing in their own filth, and hearing the cries of madness, was a horror that would only be wiped out by the atomic bomb. For the men who survived, the Bomb would be their Black Cavalry that comes riding over the ridge when all seems lost.

I take a rest from my questions and go to work on my omelet. Glancing over my notes, I remember his son mentioned a new story connected with the Oryoku Maru. Alan didn't go into detail over the phone, thinking it would be better for me to hear it from his dad.

"So, you've been talking to that son of mine. I don't want to make this into any big deal. I know Alan was excited. But you see, we did what we had to do, everyday, just to stay alive. None of us thought that it was brave or unusual."

One of the Bataan survivors, a man named Louis, revealed the incident at a recent POW reunion Frank and his son had attended. I stop taking notes and let the tape recorder do the work. I listen for the next ten minutes and Frank interrupts himself only once to ask for another cup of coffee.

That first Hell Ship which transported Frank and the other POWs was attacked on its second day by American aircraft. Ironically, the Oroyko Maru was a luxury liner, bearing no Red Cross insignia and traveling with a convoy that hugged the west coast of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. In shallow waters the ship ran aground after it was strafed and bombed. Frank explains the Japanese spent the next twenty-four hours removing their first-class passengers and service men. They grabbed the few lifeboats available and left the men to swim to shore, a distance of a quarter-mile. Frank and two of his buddies made it off the disabled ship into the water. As they swam toward shore, they saw the Japanese had already set up machine-guns, yelling for the men to stay together and not stray.

"Could you imagine, they were warning us not to run away. Run away to where!" Frank says, and a young woman at another table turns toward him and smiles.

When the three men made it to shore they collapsed. They were starving, cold, and practically naked. After a few minutes, Frank raised himself up and said what they already knew: without food and clothes, they weren't going to make it another forty-eight hours. The Japanese were too busy taking care of their own.

"I told my buddies that I had to go back to the ship. Now these men were my family, I had to try. Of course, they didn't want me to go. They even said they'd stop me. But they couldn't. They were too weak."

Frank swam out to the ship where random explosions could be heard. According to Louis, they never expected to see Corbi again. Louis said he watched the water and the ship and sadly looked for his friend. When he spotted the table legs, it took a few moments for his brain to make sense of the bizarre vision of Frank Corbi steering a wooden table through the water.

The men helped Corbi onto the beach and were startled to see the goods he had acquired. Louis says they were kissing him, crying, and then both men started yelling at Frank.

"How could they be angry with you?" I ask.

"Well, you know how friends are. They wanted to know why it took me so long. Louis was a practical man, and he thought I should have done the trip in half the time."

Frank made it aboard the Oroyku Maru and began collecting food, clothes and blankets. He found a wooden table, threw it overboard and filled the center of the table with his treasure. With Christmas piled high in the middle, he dog-paddled back to shore.

"I didn't tell my friends, but what really slowed my work was a tub of vanilla ice cream I stumbled across in the commissary. There was no way that ice cream was going to make it to shore, so I sat down and ate every bit of it." Even now Frank appears a little embarrassed that he took out time to indulge himself with dessert on a crippled ship, working it off with a little swim where he could have drowned or been shot.

In order to reach the next ship, a train transported the prisoners to northern Luzon. Boxcars that would hold forty men were packed with a hundred. Frank survived this ordeal where other men died standing up.

A torpedo disabled Frank Corbi's last vessel, leaving it to be towed the rest of the journey by a destroyer. Of the original 1600 men that boarded the Oryoku Maru, only 450 survived to Moji, a seaport not far from Nagasaki. After recuperating from his three-month ordeal, Frank began working daily, unloading ships. The prison camp overlooked the harbor, so it wasn't uncommon to hear mines exploding below. During the night, allied aircraft would seed the bay with mines, and the next day Japanese mine sweepers and unwary ships set them off. Occasionally, news of the war came from the guards. In the closing months of World War Two, these same guards talked in awe of an aircraft called the B-29 and nervously mentioned rumors of a secret weapon.

On August 9, 1945, the ground shuddered as it had many times before. Five days later Japan surrendered. In the terms of surrender, the Japanese had to provide for the safety and security of the American POWs. When Frank's liberation came a month later, he learned that the Americans, in the powerful, four-engine B-29, had dropped a new bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The explosion he had heard and felt was detonated twenty miles away.

By train, Frank passed through the center of Nagasaki, bound for the port and an American ship to take him home. He said as you neared the city, the trees furthest from the explosion had lost their leaves, the next group was without branches, until finally, the trees were gone. The burnt steel structures left standing leaned away from the center of the blast.

We leave the restaurant, then drive to the hospital to pick up Frank's wife who has undergone her weekly dialysis treatment. Frank Corbi and Agnes Svoboda were married in 1948, raised three children, and lived for the next twenty-three years at Wright Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. Aggie isn't quite ready, so Frank and I sit in the waiting room and talk about his time on the B-47 and B-52.

"They tried out new things with the aircraft all the time," Frank says, referring to his work as a Flight Test Engineer. "Today, someone would object, or try and sue. But you know, we didn't feel like guinea pigs, we knew what we were getting into. That was our duty." Frank adds, "You accepted a situation and improvised."

When they wheel Aggie into the lobby, she asks if her husband has been driving me crazy with all his stories. Not much, I say. Adding that I couldn't be that critical of a friend who bought breakfast.

It takes some maneuvering to get Aggie in the front seat and her wheelchair in the back end of the station wagon. I'm starting to get in when she warns me about all the junk cluttering my seat.

"Just throw it in back if it's in your way," she laughs. "Did he buy up the whole store?" Even after today's treatment and several years of illness, Aggie looks girlish and ready for a fight.

Frank defends himself, saying that there are some things he bought for Aggie as well.

He starts the car and I have a chance to examine more closely the spoils of his morning shopping spree. Sitting next to this small mountain of gadgets, tools and foods, it's as though I'm riding around town with Christmas in the backseat. The bearer of those gifts and his wife argue almost continually, on two different tracks - Aggie expecting her husband to be more sensible, more thrifty in the future, while Frank insists that he has forgotten some things, and may need to return to Sam's Club the next day.

Excerpted from "An American Sky"
Copyright © 2003 Fred Tribuzzo
All rights reserved

For further information about the Hell Ships, please see The Oryoku Maru Story.

About the Author

Fred Tribuzzo lives in Ravenna, Ohio, with his amazing wife Susan and an unpredictable cat named Sarah. Fred is a commercial pilot who has flown the fastest corporate jet ever made, the Citation Ten, and now flies the Boeing Business Jet. Unlike the major airlines, his job is unique in that he can be dispatched anywhere, unexpectedly, for trips ranging from thirty minutes to ten hours. And though his days are busy, there's the possibility of extended time off and exploration of new places as fate intervenes with weather delays or as passengers change their plans.

Authoring his first book, "An American Sky," has given Fred a better appreciation for the humanity in others and the untiring view of America from coast to coast.