Alfred Raymond Mosher was born in December 1921 in Adrian, Missouri. He recalled the Great Depression and how lots of people struggled to get through it. He harvested fruit for money. His mother took care of him and his brothers, while his dad worked as a mechanic, and later sold cars. He graduated high school in 1939. His father took him to Walla Walla, Washington to a sub-recruiting station where he took a test and passed. The Navy sent Mosher to Portland, Oregon where he swore in on 8 March 1940, he was shipped to [Annotator's Note: a telephone rings in the background 0:04:08.000] a Naval training center in San Diego [Annotator's Note: San Diego, California]. He then when to the Naval Hospital Corps School in San Diego for six weeks then went to another naval hospital at Bremerton, Washington for six to eight months. In April or May 1941, he received orders to go to the naval hospital on Guam [Annotator's Notes: Guam, Mariana Islands]. He remembered tthat the trip to Guam was very uneventful. They stopped at Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] for a couple of days and he was able to go ashore. When they were on the ship again, he recalled many of the servicemen had diarrhea and he was treated for dehydration. He arrived on Guam sometime in May or June 1941. Mosher remarked that Guam looked like a tropical island, and that it was undeveloped. He thought the natives were nice people, but not educated or trained to do anything. Mosher was a Navy hospital corpsman and provided care for all the military men and the natives on the island. He also worked as the night master-of-arms, in the laboratory, and then in a treatment room. Mosher recalled growing tension going on between the Japanese and American Naval ships. He listened to the shortwave radio from San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California]. For downtime, they took bicycles to the beach and played pool in the barracks. Mosher recalled that the military may have had plans of building the island up for better defense, but it was not well defended prior to World War 2.

On 7 December 1941, Alfred Raymond was sleeping and someone came and woke him up to tell him that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Notes: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii]. An hour or so after he heard the news, Japanese aircraft came flying over Guam firing machine guns and dropping bombs around the hospital. The Japanese then invaded the island a day or two later. Mosher recalled hiding with others in the pharmacy. Soon, his commanding officer told him and his unit to follow him, and they surrendered to the Japanese. He was sent to the Catholic Church for about a month, sleeping on the floor or pews, and they were given some rice a couple of times a day. One morning, the Japanese told them to line up and they marched out to the Argentina Maru [Annotator's Note: Argentina Maru, also known as the Kaiyō, was an escort carrier operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy].

[Annotator's Note: Alfred Raymond Mosher served in the Navy as a hospital corpsman in the station hospital on the island of Guam. When the Japanese invaded the island, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese.] The voyage to Japan lasted four or five days. He recalled the ship being very crowded, and many people feared not knowing what was going to happen. The Japanese gave them some clothes to wear during the trip but barely any food. When he departed the ship, the Japanese put him on a train that took him to Sensō-ji [Annotator's Note: located in Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan]. He was given a straw mat and a blanket to sleep on in a barrack room. After a few days, the Japanese gathered all the enlisted men and marched them up a hill and told them to start digging rocks out the hill. He did this everyday until June 1942. [Annotator's Note: The interviewee asks to take a break at 0:32:03.000.] The living conditions were very crowded, 30 to 40 people in one room. He was given food twice a day and was prepared by American cooks, but it was mostly rice and weeds. Mosher just had to tolerate the conditions. He did not get in trouble with the Japanese guards, but he witnessed others getting in trouble. Mosher would hear rumors about possible invasions. He thinks he saw some of the Doolittle planes while he was working in the fields which gave him hope. He recalled that there were Japanese-Americans in the camp with him helping the Japanese with interpretation.

One day, they [Annotator's Note: the Japanese] loaded Alfred Raymond Mosher and others onto an inland sea ferry and took them to Osaka [Annotator's Note: Osaka, Japan] where he stayed at a stadium for six to eight weeks while they were building a new camp for the prisoners. While in Osaka, Mosher was put on daily working parties, where the local Japanese would use the prisoners for work and then return them back to the camp at the end of the day. The work consisted of stevedoring, loading and unloading ships, and working on railroads, in warehouses, steel mills and lumberyards. He received a meal at noon. Mosher and a couple of other prisoners worked out a deal of loading and unloading barges on a flatbed train and if he completed four or five, they could take the rest of the day off. He did this until the end of the war. The living conditions were not much different than the previous camp he was at. He still slept on straw mats and a blanket. Food was cooked by cooks from Guam and consisted of rice and seaweed. There was a doctor from the Philippines in the camp, but he did have a lot of resources. Most of the prisoners had diarrhea and were sick to their stomach. The Red Cross brought packages a few times during the four years he was a prisoner. There was very little correspondence with the outside world. He received a couple of letters. His father died during the war, but Mosher did not find out until after he returned home. He recalled that his parents received a letter that he was a Prisoner of War in Japan. Mosher remarked that he never stole or tried to sneak anything into the camp, but he did witness some prisoners being beaten by the Japanese for doing so. He did not witness any executions. The prisoners consisted of servicemen from Guam, the Philippines, British ships, and the Merchant Marine. Towards the end of the war, his camp was bombed out and they were transferred to another camp nearby. The bombing continued and they were transferred to another area across the bay.

Toward the end of the World War 2, Alfred Raymond Mosher was put on a train and sent to another camp [Annotator's Note: at the time, he was a prisoner of war in Japan]. He recalled around August 1945 Allied planes were flying over and shooting and dropping bombs on the harbor. They also dropped food and supplies to the prisoners at the camp. After a few days, the sentries left the camp and he heard that the Japanese had surrendered. The prisoners were gathered and put on a train to Nagoya [Annotator's Note: Nagoya, Japan]. They were met by Americans on a hospital ship and were cleaned up, given new clothes, and given food to eat. He was eventually put on a plane and sent back to Guam [Annotator's Note: Guam, Mariana Islands]. They stayed there for a short time then went to Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] for another few days, and finally went to Seattle [Annotator's Note: Seattle, Washington] to meet his family. He was given leave for about 90 days before he had to report to Spokane [Annotator's Note: Spokane, Washington] for his first duty station for four or five months. Mosher recalled that they did not receive much information about the happenings during the war, but they would witness reconnaissance planes flying over Japan, which gave him hope. He remarked that he did not have too much contact with the guards at the prison. They had contact with only the Japanese people that they worked for while he was in the prison camp.

Alfred Raymond Mosher lost about 30 or 40 pounds while he was a prisoner. Mosher remained in the Navy for an additional 20 years and retired at age 38 as a Chief Hospital Corpsman, E7. He used the G.I. Bill to go to the University of Colorado [Annotator's Note: Denver, Colorado] and graduated in 1962. Mosher thinks the war made him more mature and it's an experience he would not want to go through again. Mosher believes that we are the best country in the world, but it has been on a decline. He believes that World War 2 did change Japan from being a military and aggressive country. The significance of having The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] is to give the public an opportunity to see what it was like then and how it affected the country. He had not heard about the atomic bombs until he was turned back over to the Americans.