The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia
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Tanagawa (135.26E
34.34N) is a small port on the
coast of Honshu
southeast of Osaka. The Kawasaki shipyard here built a small number
of SS-class supply submarines. There was also a prisoner of war camp here supplying labor to construct a dry dock and submarine base (Mansell 2010):
We marched into Tanagawa at nightfall. There were five new barracks very flimsily constructed with dirt floors and paperthin walls coming to six inches off the floor. The barracks were very cold. There were two decks of bunks with a ladder going up every twenty feet to the second deck which was 8 to 10 feet off the ground. Shoes had to be taken off at the foot of the ladder. At the foot of each bunk were five synthetic blankets made out of peanut shell fiber and a rigid pillow in the shape of a small cylinder packed with rice husks. The barracks had no heat and with temperatures falling below freezing, the conditions were pretty tough. After coming from the tropics, this was quite a shock to your system.
References
Mansell (accessed 2010-12-30)
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2010 by Kent G. Budge. Index
