Randall Edwards was born in July 1917 near Pine Bluff, Wyoming. His family lived on ranches in various parts of the upper United States, and Edwards was residing in Ruskin, Nebraska when he graduated high school in 1935. He had always wanted to join the Navy, but the selection process was such that only one in 35 applicants were accepted, and although two of his brothers had already failed to make the cut, Edwards was examined and qualified. He was sent to the San Diego Naval Training Station [Annotator's Note: in San Diego, California] and became a radioman. Edwards served his first enlistment almost entirely at the submarine base at Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii]. Just before his discharge, he was transferred back to San Diego to work on 50 "old age" destroyers that were being reconditioned for use by the British in the war in Europe. Edwards was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia for discharge, and had been out of the Navy for two months when he was contacted with an offer to re-enlist that included getting his old rating back and assignment to the base of his choice. The news of the war in Europe was not good, and German subs were sinking many Allied ships, so Edwards decided to re-enlist, and asked to be sent back to the Pearl Harbor sub base. The Navy complied with his request, and put him on a ship to Hawaii. Six weeks later, however, he was put on another ship, and sailed for China.

In 1940, Randall Edwards boarded the submarine tender USS Canopus (AS-9) in Tsingtao, China. The Canopus was a "mother ship" for 29 submarines of the Asiatic Fleet. From Tsingtao, the ship traveled to Shanghai [Annotator's Note: Shanghai, China] and maybe Vietnam before reaching Manila [Annotator's Note: Manila, Luzon, Philippines]. In the summer of 1941, Edwards was in the southern Philippines mapping and charting ports for American submarines to use when the war started. Although it was before there were any acknowledged threats, Edwards said he knew war was coming, and his ship was on 24 hour alert. Very early on the morning of 8 December [Annotator's Note: 8 December 1941], Edwards was dragged out of his bunk and told to "break out the wartime code." He watched as Nichols Field was bombed, and heard about MacArthur's [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area] refusal to engage the ready and willing B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] from Clark Field, which were soon after destroyed. The next day the Japanese bombed the Cavite Navy Yard, hitting one of the subs there, as well as the torpedo storage. Edwards' ship was ordered to leave Manila for Mariveles Bay at the foot of Bataan, and the ship was bombed repeatedly as it got under way. On 23 December a bomb went through about seven of the ship's decks and exploded on the propeller shaft. Edwards remembered picking up a shortwave radio broadcast of an FDR [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] speech that he interpreted to mean the guys in the Philippines were not going to get any help because everything was being sent to Europe. Shortly afterward, the Army asked for volunteers to operate the Rock switchboard, and Edwards did that for a short period of time before moving to the Army Signal Depot to work with the 228th Signal Operations Battalion [Annotator's Note: 228th Signal Operations Company]. Edwards was doing a little of everything, including running communications wire across the Bataan Peninsula, and soldering flashlight battery packs for the Army walkie-talkies. The weeks turned into months and the food ran out. The soldiers ate iguanas, pythons, monkeys and the last Army mules in February or March [Annotator's Note: 1942], and malaria was rampant. Luckily, Edwards had a bottle of bitter liquid quinine [Annotator's Note: an anti-malarial medication], and was able to recover from the disease.

When the Japanese General Homma [Annotator's Note: Imperial Japanese Army Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma] brought his forces to Bataan on 8 April [Annotator's Note: 8 April 1942], Randall Edwards said they [Annotator's Note: the Japanese Army] "walked over the island like it was nothing." When the Army surrendered Bataan on 9 April, Edwards' last orders indicated that he was on his own. Edwards decided to go down to Mariveles Bay and rejoin the Navy sailors on the Canopus [Annotator's Note: USS Canopus (AS-9)]. When he got there, the ship had been scuttled and was sinking. Edwards and two other sailors rigged some materials and floated the mile across from Bataan to Corregidor and with others from the Canopus formed a Navy battalion. Marine sergeants there tried to teach them to fight, and they mounted a beach defense unit. On the night of the Japanese invasion of Corregidor, the Navy unit joined the Marines in the fight against the enemy at Monkey Point, and there were very few Japanese remaining on Corregidor when General Wainwright [Annotator's Note: US Army General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, IV] declared the surrender. The Japanese had given him the ultimatum to either surrender the entire Philippine command; otherwise no man would be left alive. Edwards maintained that the American servicemen were not prisoners of war because the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Conference agreements; so the American soldiers were "just prisoners." Initially, they were held on a big concrete slab called 92nd Garage that had one, half-inch water spigot for all the troops confined there.

After Corregidor fell to the Japanese, Randall Edwards was held there for about a month, during which time the Japanese interrogated and tortured him in an attempt to learn how to break the American code quickly. A Philippine acquaintance put a stop to the process and Edwards was taken back to the holding area. He became ill with Guam blisters and yellow jaundice, and spent some time in the hospital in Malinta Tunnel. When he was released, he served as cook for a group of non-combatant Japanese and Americans who were collecting scrap metal on the island, and he ate well and was issued chits he could have used for sexual favors, but never did take advantage of the privilege for fear of venereal disease. In September [Annotator's Note: September 1942] he was taken with the main group of prisoners to Cabanatuan [Annotator's Note: Cabanatuan prisoner of war camp, Cabanatuan, Luzon, Philippines], but during the first week in October he was pulled out of the group because he was among 1,500 prisoners with technical designations that had been sold to MKK [Annotator's Note: Manchurian Machine Tool Factory] to build a factory. The American officer from the Signal Depot on Bataan [Annotator's Note: Bataan, Luzon, Philippines] was put in charge, and the prisoners were transported on the squalid transport ship, the Tottori Maru. Edwards remembers the captain allowed the Americans to bury their dead at sea. They sailed toward Formosa, and were fired upon by an American submarine, two of whose torpedoes skirted their ship on either side. At one point they landed long enough to be cleaned off with fire hoses. They were issued a cup of canteen water a day, and were fed Japanese field rations which consisted of a little sack of crackers with bits of sugar among them. They were offloaded in Pusan, Korea, and trucked up to an old Chinese army camp in Mukden, Manchuria.

Randall Edwards likened the old Chinese army camp where he was held prisoner to a group of American-style hog houses. They were long huts with a cast iron stove at one end to heat the building. For the first year, the ration was Chinese cabbage soup that was mostly water. People died "like flies," Edwards said, and Japanese doctors were brought in to find out why. The diagnosis was starvation, and the diet was switched to soybean soup. Meanwhile, the prisoners were building a factory from the ground up in Mukden. They walked five miles to the site, and sometimes the temperature would reach 40 below zero. At first Edwards was put to work as a draftsman, but he had no talent at 3-D visualization, so he was taken off the job and set up making machine tools. He didn't excel at that either. The factory was manufacturing war materials, and Edwards said he and others would intentionally sabotage the production. The behavior didn't come without consequence, however, usually consisting of a swift beating. Prisoners who resisted were run through with a bayonet. In the time Edwards spent at Mukden, three prisoners escaped; the Japanese put out a big bounty, re-captured them, brought them back to camp and beat them to death as an example.

Occasionally, there were some funny things that happened in the prison camp, according to Randall Edwards. The prisoners stole sake from the Japanese guards' stash, replacing the liquor they took from the big tubs with water, which caused the guards to complain that their army was giving them "rotten" sake. While unloading a boxcar loaded with sausages, the prisoners sidelined some of it into a snow bank near the train tracks, and they ate well for a while. However, when the snow began to melt in the spring, every now and then a sausage would appear sticking out of the melting snow; it belonged to whoever found it first. On two occasions, American B-29s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] hit the camp, killing quite a few people in the first raid. Edwards helped one wounded man, who had lost an arm and part of his skull to shrapnel, get to the infirmary. When the Japanese wanted someone to make a tape asking the American forces to quit bombing; the wounded man volunteered; his message: "They were beautiful, send them again." During the second raid, a bomb exploded in the binjo, or toilet, trench, and nobody ever fixed it. Somewhere around 15 August [Annotator's Note: 15 August 1945], Edwards saw a plane fly over, and it was dropping colored parachutes, which seemed strange. But that night the prisoners' spies reported that there was an American officer "with his ass sitting up on the Japanese colonel's desk," and the rumor spread quickly that the war was over. The news was made official at assembly the next morning, and Edwards said all the prisoners went silent, and casually walked away. Although they were not yet free to leave the camp, there was no one to stop them, and the prisoners went into the town's breweries, took what they wanted, and went back to the camp to drink. The next time the B-29s came over, they dropped food, but the canned goods came down like bombs, and some went through the kitchen roof.

Randall Edwards does not remember how he got "mixed up with the Russians," but he has photos that prove he did. He does recall that the Russians, who were joined by American officers, took over the installation, and the prisoners were kept in camp for an interminable time. Edwards said he knows that one Japanese guard they called "Wolf" never made it out. Eventually, 600 survivors were loaded onto an Army transport ship, and taken into Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Okinawa, Japan] harbor where they encountered an enormous armada. The whole fleet had to disperse because a typhoon hit the area, and while his ship was riding out the storm, an enemy mine blew out the bottom of the vessel, killing one of the POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war]. After the ship was towed to safe waters, the prisoners were unloaded on Okinawa, where they were well kept. When he arrived on Okinawa, Edwards weighed 96 pounds, but was recovering, and gained 32 pounds by the time he was moved to Guam [Annotator's Note: Guam, Mariana Islands]. From there they sailed to San Francisco, California where the former prisoners refused the coffee and doughnuts the Red Cross offered them on arrival, in protest of the neglect the organization had exhibited while the men were in the prison camp. Edwards entered Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in San Francisco, California, and remembers that one day a group from the hospital decided to make a fire and grill steaks on a street corner; neither the police nor the shore patrol challenged them. Afterward, he stayed a while in Los Angeles, California, then the Navy flew him to Norman, Oklahoma with a paper stamped "Repatriot" that was a ticket to anything. After several months, Edwards' records were in order, and he was awarded a Silver Star [Annotator's Note: the Silver Star Medal is the third-highest award a United States service member can receive for a heroic or meritorious deed performed in a conflict with an armed enemy] for action on Corregidor [Annotator's Note: Corregidor Island, Manila, Luzon, Philippines].

At 11 years in the Navy, Randall Edwards decided to make a career of the military. In 1946, he had an unfortunate experience at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Memphis, Tennessee, when the commanding officer refused to comply with a government order that all prisoners of war would be promoted to the rank they would have acquired had they not been held prisoner. Drawing the short straw, Edwards wrote his congressman in Nebraska, the commanding officer was relieved, and people started getting promoted. But Edwards failed a physical examination, and underwent extensive treatment in the hospital before someone recognized that a mistake had been made. He went back to work, relieving a communications officer, but was still only a chief petty officer. He continued to take on responsibilities, but was denied promotion. He transferred to Treasure Island, California for radio school, and contrary to reason, was sent to join the occupation forces in Japan. He moved his family there, and got along fairly well. When someone in the hierarchy realized where he had been sent, he was moved to communications at Jacksonville, Florida, where he was finally promoted to warrant officer. But, for technical and political reasons, he reverted to his enlisted rank of chief petty officer and finished his service in Brooklyn, New York, working on the electronics of the USS Ticonderoga (CV-14).

Randall Edwards retired from the Navy and got a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida. In 1958, he took a job at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee working in fusion research. Edwards describes how the work done at that facility is progressing. Returning to his incarceration in the prison camp, Edwards said there was no other alternative but to have hope. Asked his opinion of General Mac Arthur [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area], Edwards was not complimentary. His remarks about General Wainwright [Annotator's Note: US Army General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, IV] were more considerate, but not exactly appreciative. After Wainwright surrendered Bataan [Annotator's Note: Bataan Peninsula, Luzon, Philippines], Edwards had suffered at the hands of the Japanese on Corregidor [Annotator's Note: Corregidor Island, Manila, Luzon, Philippines] and on the ship to the prison camp. He has returned to China and to Japan, and maintains no animosity toward the easterners. He doesn't feel the "ordinary Japanese" were responsible for starting the war.

News that the war had ended seemed to daze Randall Edwards and his fellow prisoners of war initially. Once they got over the shock, "it was an awfully good feeling." Only now can Edwards talk about his experiences in the camp. He said, "Time cures everything." He has not been troubled by his memories, but mentioned that while listening to the Victory Belles at The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana], he was moved. He believes that the worst things about being a prisoner of war were the "complete loss of freedom," and "being at the absolute mercy of the enemy."