The Amazing Story of Althea Dyer and June Rice
by Julia Brown
In the Blake Community in DeKalb County, Alabama two elderly women enthrall listeners by accounts of their battle for survival as missionary prisoners of war, captured by the Japanese in the Philippines. Ninety-six-year-old Althea C. Dyer and seventy-four-year-old June E. Rice suffered from hunger and countless other hardships during World War II. Their courage and their capacity for forgiveness constitute a story which should be preserved for future generations. June has lived in DeKalb County for the past twelve years, and Althea Dyer has lived in DeKalb County for the past 25 years. Althea has lived with June and her husband, Dr. Donald D. Rice, for the past fourteen years.
June Rice (left) and her mother Althea Dyer (right)
Althea was born and reared in Massachusetts. She, her husband, Harlan Leigh Dyer, and their daughter, five-year old June, went forth from the Seventh-day Adventist Church as missionaries to the Philippines in 1937. Harlan L. Dyer was treasurer of the Philippine Union College and also taught business courses??typing, shorthand and calligraphy. The family was due to come home in 1942, but a disaster occurred that changed the course of their lives forever.
It was December 7, 1941. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Adventists made a decision to send the women and children away from the college to a mountainous area with cabins, where they thought they would be safe. They packed that morning and started for the mountains with bombs falling all around the cars. The automobiles pulled off into a field and the occupants hid underneath them as shrapnel fell all around. They were near Clark Field (which would later be occupied by the Japanese after the surrender of US forces on Bataan.) They eventually got to the small cabins in Baguio. The women and children went inside and the men who drove them left to return to the college.
The women and children had been there about twenty days when the Japanese came to get them. One of the missionaries spoke Japanese and asked permission from their captors for the families each to take a small suitcase. The request was granted but Althea did not pack a single garment of clothing. Instead she dressed herself and June in three sets of clothes and packed sheets and pillowcases to make later clothes, in which she hid red kidney beans, rice and sugar that she had carefully placed inside. The prisoners were separated by gender and then marched to Camp John Hay, a captured U.S. Army base. June said that valuable lessons were learned that day. Some Japanese soldiers were kind and carried on their shoulders some little ones. Others forced adults and children, prodding them with the points of their bayonets. When the Dyers were hungry, Althea would reach into the pillowcases and allot her family four to five beans each to keep them from starving.
Camp John Hay at the beginning of World War II, was used as a concentration camp, one of the first Japanese internment camps in the Philippines. American civilians and their allies were rounded up in Baguio and nearby provinces on the suspicion that they were spies. More than 500 men, women and children, consisting of missionaries, miners, bankers ,etc. were crowded into two buildings. These buildings were old barracks that had been used by the Army. Designed to house 50 men, they now housed the more than 500 prisoners. The only walking spaces were small aisles between pallets on the floor. The men and women had been separated from the beginning into the separate buildings
Approximately 45 to 50 of the prisoners were missionaries. Harlan Dyer was not with them as he had been placed under house arrest and allowed to work at the Adventist College. The first project for the weary internees was to clean the buildings. Water had to be carried to the kitchen. The lack of water, inside the fence, outside latrines, lack of screens for doors and windows, and the crowded conditions, contributed to poor sanitation that caused intestinal diseases to develop. Dysentery became so prevalent that a small dispensary was set up in the barracks.
June said they slept on sheets on the floor. Althea added that it was not grass, it was cement. At that camp they received two meals a day, but they were allotted only one glass of water‐‐ a half glass in the morning and a half glass in the evening. Outside the fence there was a hydrant that ran water for 24 hours a day. June said this was a cruel gesture by the guards to make the prisoners thirst more for a cool drink of water. There was a German Adventist missionary family , the Bahrs who were not put into the camp, because the Germans and Japanese were allies in the war. The Bahrs were not on the side of the Japanese, however.
When the Dyers and others had been there about five months. Mrs. Bahr baked a very small six inch cake and brought it to the camp. She told the guards that she had many friends there that had had birthdays and requested that she be allowed to leave the cake for them. She must have been very persuasive because the guards permitted her to leave it. The cake was cut into very small pieces so everyone could have a bite. Inside the cake there was a small note telling them that they would soon be released.
The German lady was right‐‐ in a way. The missionaries left Camp John Hay about a month later. Again they were all placed into trucks and driven to Manila. There they were united with their men folk, all under house arrest.
In Manila, at the Adventist Philippine Union College, the Dyers lived in a small house that was occupied by now, two families. They were given no food and survived only because the Filipinos who were connected to their church risked their lives to leave parcels on their porch. One day a female goat was left near the porch. They managed somehow to get a male goat so they could start a goat family. The final goat count was six, which were given the following names: Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Baby. These female animals brought joy to June because they gave her something to do. It was her job to take good care of the goats, which included milking them. Althea reiterated that they would have had nothing to eat had the brave Filipinos not risked their lives to help. ?We survived by living humble lives and God was good to us,? she said.
In February 1944 the Japanese gathered the missionaries together and told them things were so bad that they were going to put them back into concentration camps. They were trucked to Santo Thomas University. Althea. Harlan and June slept there three nights before they were loaded into cattle cars on a train.
They were then taken to Los Banos, an agricultural school. They were in Barrack #16 with people of many nationalities and different religious denominations. About 500 were sent to this camp. Two‐thousand non missionaries were already there. At first they were kept apart. The missionary side was nicknamed, "The Holy City," and the other side was, "The Devil's Campground."
While under house arrest in Manila the Americans were fitted with red arm bands that identified them as Americans. The Japanese thought this would keep the Filipinos from helping them, but it worked in reverse‐‐it pointed them out to the Filipinos, and separated them from the Germans. It was learned that Harlan Dyer (who was by now with his family at Los Banos ) had cooked in a lumber camp in Maine when he was younger. He was given the job of cooking for the 500 internees. Each morning the Japanese brought to the camp a bushel of potatoes, a bushel of carrots and a bushel of corn. From those meager rations he made a stew that fed the 2,500 people in the camp. They were served two meals per day. The breakfast menu was four tablespoons of corn mash in coconut milk.
Every once in a while they got some coconut meat. The dinner menu was four tablespoons of rice and a cup of the 'beautiful, purple stew? that her father made. The detainees lost a lot of weight, and women died in childbirth. They could not get any help from the Filipinos because they were enclosed by a double fence with guards all around it. They were there almost a year??the worst year of their confinement, and a year that was marked by many killings. By this time June was thirteen and a half years old. She weighed about 50 pounds. Althea weighed about 89 pounds, and Harlan weighed less than 100 pounds.
In the concentration camp each family was confined to a room that was six by eight, no matter how many children were in the family unit. June, like most of the children, slept on a board up in the rafters. There was only one light for the whole building. The men and women would gather underneath the light and exchange recipes. They knew they couldn?t cook, but it gave them something interesting to do. The only recreation the children had was playing hopscotch in figures they drew on the ground. Parents made an effort to give the children some education by teaching them math, geography, history and the Bible, using the dusty, ground to write lesson facts. When the guards came by, the lessons were quickly and easily erased by moving the feet.
Harlan, who was very creative, needed an outlet for his talents. After much pleading from him and a lot of thought on Althea?s part, she let him have one of the cotton, domestic sheets she had brought. From memory June?s Dad drew a map of the Philippines with precise accuracy.
Map of the Philippines drawn by Harlan Dyer from memory
Around the map were drawings of different scenes from the country. One was the concentration camp. Included on the map was a compass rose and small sections showing scenes of the Philippines.
The compass rose drawn by Harlan Dyer from memory
The map and pictures were done with beautiful calligraphy with India ink. June had bartered with other prisoners to get the India ink and crayons to draw and color this remarkable work of art. At the time of their liberation, General Douglas MacArthur saw the map and offered to pay $10,000.00 for it. The Dyers rejected his generous offer. It was to be dedicated for the Lord"s work. Today it is a treasured, preserved artifact. It will be donated to a Seventh‐day Adventist museum at Andrews University in Berrien Springs Michigan. In regard to General MacArther, June said she was very impressed when he shook hands with every person who had been detained in the camp.
June is 74 years old, but many events are etched into her memory as if they had happened yesterday. She tells the story of five nuns being brought into the concentration camp.
They were brought in from a cave, and the young, inquisitive June slipped down to the interrogation hut to see what was happening. The commandant himself was keeping guard and recognized her as being the daughter of the camp cook. He ordered her to come to him and then told her he was hungry and wanted her to bring him some food. A frightened young girl, June, ran back to her mother and told her of the request. Althea quickly cooked up some beans and rice, put them in June?s canteen, and sent it to the man. A few weeks later the commandant came to their cubicle and asked to see the child. He handed her the canteen and abruptly left. The canteen was filled with Canadian Mints, and sugar. June never forgot this occasion, or the lesson learned that the harshest of people could have soft spots.
The greatest experience she had during this long period of incarceration was the Christmas of 1944 which she will never forget. Her father, inventive fellow that he was, tied a magnet around June?s waist and when it dragged the ground it collected all sorts of metal things, such as nails and screws. Her father found two old two by fours and painstakingly made her a pair of the most beautiful stilts she had ever seen. June said she did not have an outgoing personality before, and having these stilts, that she shared with the other children, made her feel very special.
Approximately three weeks before the Americans came to liberate them the Japanese started decreasing the internee's food supply, and began to give them un‐husked rice. They were so weak they could hardly pound off the husks. About the same time they saw something unusual‐‐ P-38s flying over the camp. The first day there were three of them, the second day two of them and the third day one. That was the day before they were rescued.
The Los Banos Camp was enclosed by two mountains, a huge cornfield, and a lake. The Japanese were building a gun turret into the side of one of the mountains. Each morning the guards would count the POWs, after they had been lined up on the dirt road facing the turret. This last morning the Japanese made their plans to finish off the internees by mowing them down from the gun turret.
General MacArthur had heard about the camp and had made careful plans to take out the Japanese. Three of his men had infiltrated the camp to get the layout. (After the war was over, June met one of these men in Elizabeth, N.J.) At 7:00 A.M. on February 23, 1945, paratroopers using red. white, and blue parachutes quietly dropped into the cornfield, and amphibious tanks came across the lake. Carefully orchestrated, the US attack was made when the Japanese guards, having laid down their weapons, were doing their daily calisthenics. The paratroopers entered the camp buildings as the infantry mowed down the Japanese. The POWs had five minutes to get out of burning buildings that the infantry had torched‐‐ burning down everything. Althea's hair had caught on fire. A soldier put it out with coconut juice.
Those released raced over the ground covered with the bodies of dead Japanese, Althea, Harlan and June among them. As they were herded into the amphibious tanks, vehicles that none of them had ever heard of, let alone seen, Althea fainted, thinking they would all be drowned. They escaped by being herded 48 people into each tank. Miraculously, no one in the camp was killed, although some were wounded.
They were taken to a MASH unit in New Bilibid Prison, behind the lines, outside of Manila. Supplies for the unit were parachuted in every day. The first meal served here was tomato soup, crackers, and milk. Twenty-five hundred were fed here, but ten thousand meals were served as so many went back for more servings. The soldiers were told not to give out too many concentrated chocolate bars, but June said that she ate seventeen that first day. She got very sick and spent time in the hospital.
They came home on a troopship with 4,000, an American hospital ship. It was torpedoed but did not sink. A typhoon struck. They landed safely in San Pedro, California. The Dyer's had been very sea sick. Dressed in army clothes they looked quite odd. Some of the merchants in San Pedro helped to make them more presentable.
June had not attended school in four years, but had studied with her toes in the dust. These lessons enabled her to take fours years of schooling in one so she could graduate with her 8th grade class at Browning Memorial S.D.A. School in South Lancaster, Massachusettes, in 1946.
The mission was not over for this awe‐inspiring Christian lady‐‐Althea. She had only been home from her horrendous experience in the concentration camps for a year when the Dyers made a decision to go back to the Seventh‐day Adventist Philippine Union College. They wanted to help rebuild the school and to witness about the Christian faith to their former captors. The family set sail for the Philippines in 1947 amd three months later June was sent to Far Eastern Academy in Shanghai China to attend high school.
Many of their Japanese captors and guards had been tried by the Philippine government and were incarcerated in prison awaiting execution for their war crimes. Althea visited them and witnessed to them, by giving Bible studies. As a result, nineteen of them gave their lives to Christ and were baptized. As they were sent to their deaths, Althea was by their side reading the Bible and sharing her love and faith. "I will see you in the morning, my brother," she repeated to each one. They did not die alone. She watched their executions with tears in her eyes and recorded in her Bible the names of those who had accepted the Adventist faith and placed the date of their baptisms.
She later interceded on behalf of a medical doctor, Dr. Itchinose' who had done some really bad things that she felt he had been forced to do. Seeing goodness in the man, she begged the authorities not to keep him from using his medical ability to help others. Succeeding in saving him, through Althea?s witness he became and excellent Christian and the head of the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Tokyo, Japan.
June and her husband, Donald, a Doctor of Eduation , have been foster parents to children for the past 45 years, taking many and some that could not be placed because of disabilities. They adopted six others, Dawn, Dean, Dennis, Daniel, Douglas, and Deborah, before having foster children and a daughter of their own, Dorothy, after fifteen years of marriage. They had been married on "D-Day" , June 6, 1955. They are extremely proud of all of their children, and are still fostering children in their retirement years. They have had 167 foster children and are presently working for DeKalb County DHR. in Alabama.
Asked to what she attributed her long life, Althea said: ?I have always lived by the Golden Rule, treating others as I would have them treat me. For some reason God has blessed me with a long and healthy life.? As she nears her 97th birthday, she takes no medication and for 96 gets around just fine.
I thank June and Althea for granting this interview. Robert Moehr, videographer, donated his time to videotape the interview. It will be added to the set of World War II Veteran interviews for which Landmarks hopes to obtain funding to place in each library and school in DeKalb County.
http://www.landmarksdekalbal.org/articles/AltheaDyerAndJuneRice.html
