Angus Lorenzen was born in August 1935 in Carlisle, England. His family home was in China but expatriates had to go home every four years and he was born during one of those trips. His father was born in China. In 1880, his grandfather was a Danish sailing ship captain who had shipwrecked there. His grandfather became the Chief Pilot on the Yangtze River at Nutrong [Annotator's Note: unable to locate, possibly Nantong, China]. In 1914 Lorenzen's father was living in the German consulate of Tinsen [Annotator's Note: known as Tsingtao, now called Qingdao, China]. Tinsen had European countries in assigned areas to defend against warlords after the Manchu revolution [Annotator's Note: Revolution of 1911, now known as the Xinhai Revolution]. Lorenzen's father was shot and wounded by an English sentry and sent to a Prisoner-of-War camp. Americans got him paroled and he went to the United States in 1917. He volunteered for the US Army and was sent to France in 1917. The Germans started an offensive against France in May 1918 and Lorenzen's father was offered a commission. To become an officer, he was granted American citizenship by an Act of Congress. The war ended and he briefly went to Trier, Germany as an occupier. He ultimately went back to work in China for the China-America Trading Company. He married and had one son when his wife died of fever. His father then became a manager of an American Life Insurance company that would later become the American Insurance Group, AIG. His father was very comfortable, and he married his second wife, Lorenzen's mother, in 1931.

Angus Lorenzen grew up in China and was very privileged. His family had ten servants, a large home and a country club membership. In December 1941 he was studying with his mother when his father came into the room and said they had to talk. He had arranged transportation to get his family out of China because the war with Japan was about to start. The Japanese had occupied Tinsen [Annotator's Note: now Qingdao, China], where they lived, since the start of the 1937 Sino-Japanese War [Annotator's Note: Second Sino-Japanese War, between the Republic of China and Empire of Japan, 7 July 1937 to 2 September 1945]. He did not want them to be interred in a camp. On 4 December, Lorenzen and his sister, and mother boarded a small coastal collier [Annotator's Note: coal ship] to go to Hong Kong. The captain did not want to sail through the Formosa Straits and took the ship to the east. There, they were caught in a typhoon which delayed them for a day. They arrived on 8 December 1941 [Annotator's Note: this was 7 December to the east of the International Date Line]. The captain announced that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, Hawaii as they came into Hong Kong. Ships were leaving Hong Kong because they expected a Japanese invasion. Their ship docked to get provisions. His mother went to the British Consulate who said there was nothing left for them to take out of Hong Kong. That afternoon they went to their original ship and left just as the Japanese invaded. Four days later they sailed into Manila Bay, Philippines. They were in line going in and they could see smoke rising from where the Japanese were bombing. The ship next to theirs was hit, so they went over to the Batang Peninsula [Annotator's Note: Negros Occidental, Philippines] and anchored in the cove. As a six-and-a-half-year-old kid, the ship being bombed was actually exciting and he felt no fear.

There was a nice beach [Annotator's Note: in a cove along the Batang Peninsula] where Angus Lorenzen and his fellow refugees could spend the day to avoid being bombed on the ship. They did spend the nights on the ship. They spent seven days there. They walked inland and came to a road once where they saw US Army trucks with troops who gave them the Victory sign when passing. They visited a Filipino village where they had lunch. The captain of the ship had figured out the Japanese bombing schedules and he thought he could get into Manila safely. They sailed down the coast and saw that every cove contained a ship of others hiding. His father's company in China arranged accommodations for them at the Manila Hotel on 17 or 18 December [Annotator's Note: December 1944]. They did some exploring around town. Lorenzen had chocolate milk there for the first time in his life. His mother received a call from the British Consulate to come to a meeting for expatriates in Manila. Lorenzen was outside playing when two Japanese Zeros came flying low with a P-48 [Annotator's Note: possibly a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] chasing them so they dove under a table for safety. His mother found out that Manila was being evacuated by the Americans and was being declared an open city. On 2 January 1942 the Japanese Army marched in, expecting a welcome they did not receive. Lorenzen's family had already been living under Japanese occupation in China, and as children there was no real concern. Their mother ordered them to stay at the hotel. On 5 December 1942 [Annotator's Note: 5 January 1942] they boarded a bus and were driven to Santo Tomas University [Annotator's Note: Santo Tomas Internment Camp, or, Manila Internment Camp, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines]. They registered to be in the camp and were assigned a dormitory. Within four months almost 4,000 people were brought in.

Angus Lorenzen and his sister and mother were placed in the Japanese internment camp at Santo Tomas University, Manila, Philippines. Their dormitory was an open room that had been a classroom. There were cots for them to sleep on. That dorm later became the men's shower room and they were moved to the third floor of the main building. Only much later did he realize that if they had remained in that dormitory they would have been killed after liberation when the Japanese shelled the area. There were not enough shower or toilet facilities since it had not been built for that. Lorenzen's first meal was a dinner of noodles and prunes, which he thought was terrible. They were eating supplies that had been provided before the Japanese took the city, two meals a day. They had to figure out their own way to get lunch in between. The Filipinos would sell them food through the fence surrounding them. They would get their breakfast and then go to a field where the kids could play. They would siesta in the afternoon, eat dinner, and then go back to the dormitory. The later arrivals had to sleep on the floor and things got increasingly difficult. Everyone was getting ill due to the change in diet which made things worse. There was a coordinating committee that made improvements to the camp, making it more civilized. Their mosquito netting provided them the only measure of privacy they had.

The Japanese were friendly towards children, so Angus Lorenzen did not fear them. He talked with them until about four months after they came in. Three young men escaped over the wall one night and were captured. They were brought back and tortured for three days, which he could hear. They were then taken out of the camp and shot and killed. After that, they feared the Japanese and found ways to hide from them. Lorenzen did not go to school in the camp because his mother enrolled him and his sister at the Holy Ghost Children's Home [Annotator's Note: College of the Holy Spirit Manila in Manila, Philippines], a nunnery that took care of 100 children and their education. Lorenzen was afraid of the nuns and did not like it so well. He remembered the story of Joan of Arc and how the Catholics had burned her at the stake. After a few weeks he asked his mother if he could return to Santo Tomas and she agreed. By then they had been built a shanty. His sister stayed at the school until 1944. His mother could get a permit to visit the school every few weeks. The first year, things in the camp were fairly loose and the Japanese were relatively nice to everyone overall. Around 1943 when the Japanese started losing a lot of battles, things got worse. The Japanese propaganda through the newspaper was exactly the opposite of the truth. Many Filipinos knew the people inside the camp and would send things in for them. Lorenzen did enter the camp school after his return because when the Americans were brought in, the teachers came in. His education in England had been quite different and he found the classwork to be fairly easy. He has a hard time remembering people's names. Later he flew back for the 60th Anniversary and his wife asked him about any friends. He had only remembered Alonso who was black and nobody else wanted to play with him. Lorenzen got involved in baseball some years later and met a woman who seemed familiar. She turned out to be Alonso's sister and she was half-American Negro and half-Filipino and that's why there was prejudice against her and her brother.

Angus Lorenzen took regular types of classes in the Japanese internment camp at Santo Tomas University in Manila, Philippines. He and his mother lived in the dormitory at curfew even though they had a shanty they could stay in during the day. The Japanese made a lot of rules which grew stringent at the end of January 1944 when the military took over from Japanese civilians. The camp was enclosed by a wall on three sides and a covered fence on the fourth. After 1944, no outside packages or communication was allowed in, nor were doctors or nurses. Nurses that had been captured on Corregidor [Annotator's Note: Battle of Corregidor, 5 to 6 May 1942] were in the camp as well as some doctors. [Annotator's Note: Lorenzen talks of relationships there that he discovered later in life.] As time went on, food became very scarce. They managed to grow some plants like Talinum [Annotator's Note: a genus of herbaceous succulents grown as a leaf vegetable], but not much and the size of servings got smaller. Everyone had to work, and the women would pick out bugs from the rice, but they did not find them all. They got used to eating the bugs for the protein. When the Japanese took over and the camp committee could no longer buy food, things got grim. Lorenzen says they were lucky to get 700 calories of food per day. When liberated, the doctors said it looked like the prisoners were getting leftovers from the Japanese camps. The night of liberation, dinner was stew, water with some plant leaves on top with a few beans on the bottom. They would count them and eat them one at a time. Lorenzen had 12 beans the night of liberation. He also heard rumors that the American forces were very close by.

On 3 February 1945, Angus Lorenzen saw a Marine Corp dive bomber fly over the internment camp of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines, very low. The gunner threw his goggles out with a note that read "roll out tomorrow" which made everyone very happy. The news spread like wildfire. After dinner, they had a roll call which they had been doing twice a day. Around Christmas 1944, long roll calls came more often. On this evening, they thought it would be a long one, but the Japanese were acting totally normal. They were allowed outside until curfew. As it got dark, Lorenzen could see lights flaring in the distance and then he heard and felt a very deep rumble. The internees knew it had to be good and they got excited. His mother had made some hardtack biscuits in a tin box and she gave the last two biscuits to the kids. They began to hear another deep rumble and people shouting and screaming "they're here". He ran down and tried to get outside, but he saw a tank sticking through the front door of the building. A Japanese soldier was lying on the ground. The Japanese soldier was the sergeant that they all hated the most. The Japanese had taken hostages inside and sent some officers out to negotiate with the Americans who had taken the camp. The Japanese carried suicide grenades in their uniforms and this soldier had reached for his grenade when he was shot. [Annotator's Note: This is speculation as he indicates.] The tank pulled back and the soldiers started herding the internees back into the building, when shooting began. The Japanese holding the hostages had begun shooting people in the plaza. The Americans surrounded them with tanks and machine guns. The Japanese hid among the internees, so the Americans halted their fire. Lorenzen went back up to his dorm and two machine gun crews ran past him and went up the roof. They set up machine guns just above him, so he just watched them attacking the Japanese. He was exhausted then and fell asleep. He went to get breakfast the next morning and the cooks had gotten the food the Japanese had been withholding and gave it to them. The Americans had dug a shallow foxhole in front of his shanty. He talked with them quite a bit and received a candy bar from them. His first in three years.

More tanks came in on 4 February [Annotator's Note: 4 February 1945], and they placed guards all around as there were 26,000 Japanese troops still in the city. Angus Lorenzen was a little nervous, but the Americans just kept coming in and assembling in the camp. He went around and talked with them. His mother had been unable to communicate with their father as he had been taken prisoner in Tinzen, China [Annotator's Note: Qingdao, China]. His father's boss had been a good friend of Wild Bill Donnelly [Annotator's Note: US Army Major General William Joseph Donovan, also known as Wild Bill, was head of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA] in World War 1, and Donnelly needed a person to head up OSS operations in Asia. In a prisoner exchange, Donovan arranged for Lorenzen's father to be taken to India. His father then boarded the MS Gripsholm which was bringing Japanese businessmen and their families to exchange in equal numbers with the Americans. They arrived in August 1943 and his father was asked to volunteer to go back to China. He agreed and was indoctrinated into the OSS in early 1944. He worked in Chunking [Annotator's Note: Chongqing, China]. When the war ended, he was in Chunking and went back to Tinzen. There was nothing there for him and their house had been ransacked, so he went to Shanghai, China where his corporate job's headquarters were. On 2 April 1945, Lorenzen, his sister and mother boarded the John Lykes [Annotator's Note: SS John Lykes] and were repatriated to San Pedro, California on 2 May 1945.

Angus Lorenzen, his sister and mother left Manila, Philippines aboard the SS John Lykes and were repatriated to San Pedro, California on 2 May 1945. The American soldiers departed ship first. They debarked and took buses into downtown Los Angeles in the afternoon. They had no idea of what to do. They went to an Elk's Club and were met by a tall sergeant who knew his mother. It turned out to be his brother who had returned to the United States from China after having had been a guerilla, then a Flying Tiger [Annotator's Note: First American Volunteer Group, or AVG, Chinese Air Force, 1941 and 1942], and then inducted into the US Army. He had been sent to the United States in early 1945 due to an illness. His father had pre-arranged all of this. Lorenzen could not believe how much food was available to them. The family then crossed the country by train to Chicago, Illinois. They spent half a day there on VE-Day. There was a great celebration going on. Lorenzen did not know a single thing about the war in China [Annotator's Note: he seems to mean Europe]. War had been declared when he was in England in summer of 1939 on a trip. The ship they were to return to China on had been turned into an attack transport by the Royal Navy, the HMS Rawalpindi, the most dramatic naval sacrifice of World War 2. [Annotator's Note: He tells the story.] They ended up going back to China on a Japanese ship which was probably best due to the Japanese being allied with Germany, making it reasonably safe.

After arriving in the United States in May 1945, Angus Lorenzen crossed the country by train to go to New York City. They were supposed to eventually go to his mother's home in England. They stayed in upstate New York at the home of Neil Starr [Annotator's Note: Cornelius Vander Starr, an operative of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA] for a couple of weeks. Then they boarded a ship to Glasgow, Scotland where he was amazed to see bombed-out buildings on the way down to the Scottish border to his grandparent's home on the River Eden, three miles from his birthplace at Carlisle. Life there was grim. He and his sister were put in boarding schools. His sister hated it and convinced her mother to take her when she returned to Shanghai, China. Life in England was bad. Hot water, food, and power were all rationed. Lorenzen did not like his boarding school. He also had a slight amount of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. This had started during the battle of Manila, Philippines after he was liberated from the internment camp. He heard an airplane going into a diving attack. He was next to a soldier who told him not to worry because it was an American plane. He realized later that whenever he heard an airplane fly over, he instinctively looked for shelter. He says that the other kids around him in England did not have this same condition, but they had not been in areas that had had a lot of bombing. He kept this hidden because he felt it was not manly. By the time he was in America two years later he no longer had the problem. He does know people who have anxiety attacks due to their experiences.

Angus Lorenzen left England for the United States. His mother had gone back to Shanghai in 1946. His father did not want to be in China when the Communists took over and arranged to move the family to San Mateo, California in 1947. Lorenzen traveled to the United States to join them there. He traveled alone mostly on the RMS Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Mary passed them off of the Isle of Wight, England. Lorenzen had to start school about a month after arriving in San Mateo. The fact that he had been a prisoner in the war was not a big deal to the other kids. He later became very close to the Japanese kids who had been interred in the American camps. [Annotator's Note: The tape breaks then restarts with him talking about the internment camp in the Philippines.] On Christmas Day 1944, in the Japanese internment camp in Manila, Philippines, they had a slightly larger serving of food. They all spoke of what they would have the first Christmas they were free. They did exchange gifts to the best they could within families. The camp would try to give a gift to each kid but it always very simple. [Annotator's Note: Lorenzen talks of a book about the camp that is coming out.]

Angus Lorenzen, his sister and mother were internees in the Santo Tomas Camp in Manila, Philippines. On 3 February 1945, the Americans broke through the gate in the evening. On 7 February, MacArthur [Annotator's Note: US Army General Douglas MacArthur] came to the camp. That morning his mother made him dress as nicely as he could there. He had breakfast and came back up to the third floor when he noticed a hole in one of the windows very high up. He reached down to pick up what he thought had caused the hole, and it burned his hand. The kids had been collecting shrapnel and now he had the prize of his life because it was large and heavy. He went outside and walked over to the men's dorm and he realized the front of the chapel had been blown off. No one had realized they had been hit by the Japanese because the artillery in the camp was often firing and they had gotten used to it. The camp was packed when MacArthur arrived and made a speech to them all. After he left, Lorenzen and a friend were outside when a shell hit the building and exploded. He went to where his mother and sister were, and she told them to get to shelter. The Americans would count the time down between shell hits. There was around 30 minutes between bursts. Thinking they had time, a soldier and a girl went out to have a cigarette when a shell arrived in only five minutes and they were hit. The attacks slowed over the next three days and then stopped altogether. After that the Americans reduced their presence in the camp to lessen the Japanese attacks. The Battle of Manila was occurring south of the camp. This lasted about two weeks. Since the American artillery was north of them, the outgoing artillery shells would fly over the camp and it was very intense.

Angus Lorenzen, his sister, and mother were still living in the now liberated Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, Philippines during the Battle of Manila. The Central Post Office building was the most contested area of Manila. Santo Tomas was only one mile away, so they heard a lot of the fighting. After securing passage to leave, his family went through Manila by bus along the north bank of the Pasig River. They could see a lot of devastation. The bridges were out. A cathedral's tower was full of holes. It was almost total destruction, second only to the destruction of Warsaw, Poland. The Japanese had held Filipinos as human shields. 100,000 civilians were killed in the Battle of Manila. By that time, Lorenzen hated the Japanese intensely. When he heard of the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan, he did not know what it meant other than the surrender occurred. Later in England he learned how intensely bad that had been for the Japanese. He did not want any part of that. He went through bomb drills later in school and fear of the bomb was a major part of his generation growing up. At that point in time, he considered that the Japanese deserved it. Since then, he has learned more of the meaning of the bomb. The Americans expected one million Allied casualties in an invasion of Japan. Meanwhile the Japanese were training all civilians to defend their country in suicidal manners. Had the bombs not been dropped there would have been close to 13 million people killed versus the 200,000 due to the two bombs.

For Angus Lorenzen, the excitement of sailing into Manila Bay, Philippines while under attack by the Japanese is his most memorable experience [Annotator's Note: during the Japanese attacks on the Philippines in December 1941]. His sister had never talked of her war experiences until prompted by her daughter later in life. He and his sister had a facetious conversation about how awful their lives would have been if the war had not happened, because, in fact, they led very privileged lives prior to the war. Being an American in the 1940s and 1950s was a great time to be an American though. He feels it is the only generation that grew up not faced with a major war to have to deal with. World War 2 today is mostly unknown to most Americans and means very little to them. The 110,000 Japanese interned by America is the most of what is known, versus the 160,000 Americans interned by the Japanese. Lorenzen thinks The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana is absolutely essential to share what is now called the Greatest Generation's experience and sacrifice. America would not be what it is today if the people who returned from that war did not create this country. They were at the forefront of building American Industrial strength. The drama of experience is what people want to hear. The daily drudgery of war is not what appeals.