POLK COUNTY, Fla. -- At 101 years old, World War II veteran Randall Edwards still vividly recalls what he endured while in a Japanese labor camp, in what was then Manchuria and is now a part of China. 

They are memories he simply can't forget. 

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  • He says 13,000 people died in the camps
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"We did what we were told or we died," Edwards said. 

He recalled working 12- to 14-hour days and eating soybean soup. He said one time, he and his fellow prisoners were able to steal sausage and hide it in the snow, eating it months later.

"We fought the Japanese every day we were in prison camp. We sabotaged every piece of machinery that we built in that factory," Edwards said.

"They surrendered approximately 23,000 Americans to the Japanese in 1942. Ten thousand of us came back. The other 13,000 died in the Japanese prison camps. Starvation, beatings, murder, execution, you name it. It was all there."

Edwards ended up in the forced labor camp when Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered the Allied troops fighting in Corregidor. 

"We were overwhelmed, and (they) told Wainwright, which was the Army general in charge of the whole works, that if you do not surrender, I will exterminate to the last man every man and woman on Corregidor," recalled Edwards.

The surrender happened May 6, 1942, a month after the fall of Bataan on April 9.

Edwards said he would have escaped if he could. But he never forgot the three Americans who did escape while he was there, only to be found three days later and beaten in front of everyone at the slave labor camp.

Edwards never saw them again, so he presumed they were dead. 

"The main ingredient of being a prisoner of war is the loss of freedom. Freedom is worth fighting for wherever you are. We have freedom in the United States of a sort, and we are probably the only ones in the world who have true freedom, and we're losing it rapidly." - Randall Edwards

For the first two years in the prison camp, Edwards' family had no idea where he was. Then, his mother got a telegram after the Japanese recognized him as a prisoner of war in 1944. 

In August 1945, when the Americans won the war, Edwards was told he was free. That was more than three years after he was imprisoned.

"I was paralyzed, really. All we could do was walk. We couldn't talk, we didn't talk. We didn't holler, didn't scream, but in about an hour or so, we came alive," Edwards said. 

Edwards said he felt cheated, because after returning to the States, he remained at the E-7 rank until he retired from the U.S. Navy, never having received a Purple Heart for an injury to his finger.

He retired from the Navy after 20 years and studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida. 

Now, he spends his time reading and sharing his story. 

"The main ingredient of being a prisoner of war is the loss of freedom," Edwards said. "Freedom is worth fighting for wherever you are. We have freedom in the United States of a sort, and we are probably the only ones in the world who have true freedom, and we're losing it rapidly."