SPECIAL REPORT * A Culver City couple were among the American civilians held prisoner in barbaric conditions in the Philippines during World War II. Now, they tell Japan, it’s . . .

They have seen apologies made and $20,000 reparation checks handed over to Japanese Americans who were rounded up and held in U.S. internment camps during World War II.

And they have watched as legislation was enacted that allows American prisoners of war to sue Japanese companies that allegedly used them as slave labor.

No wonder Frances and Louis Bachleder keep wondering if they will be next to be compensated for the personal hell their family went through in a wartime concentration camp.

The Culver City couple are among the final victims of a largely ignored group of American civilians who were imprisoned for more than three years in Japanese camps.

Nearly 14,000 U.S. civilians were rounded up by the Japanese in the Philippines and other Pacific areas at the outbreak of the war and held in the makeshift prisons.

The Bachleders are among about 1,500 who are still alive. They realize that time is growing short for anyone to make amends to survivors. Yet they haven’t given up.

They are part of a belatedly organized but fast-growing campaign to pressure both the United States and Japan into considering $20,000 reparation payments to Americans who were rounded up and imprisoned by the Japanese. But to succeed, they must overturn part of a World War II peace treaty.

“We were sold out,” said Louis Bachleder, 87. “It makes me sick to see the way we’ve been treated.” Added 82-year-old Frances Bachleder: “After what all of us went through, it’s a bitter feeling.”

The couple and their infant son were held for 37 months at the Santo Tomas Camp, a commandeered, fenced-off university near Manila. Along with 2,336 other Americans, they lived by their wits--fashioning a shelter out of scrap lumber and canvas and continually scrounging for food.

They were rescued when U.S. troops invaded the city and an American tank crashed through the camp gate and was immediately engulfed by starving prisoners desperate for food.

After the war, the U.S. government passed the 1948 War Claims Act so it could tap frozen Japanese assets to help the civilian internees resume their lives. Payment totaled $1 for each day in captivity (50 cents a day for children). To the dismay and anger of concentration camp survivors, that would be all they ever received.

In a formal 1951 peace treaty signed by the United States and Japan, the American government waived “all reparations and claims . . . arising out of any actions taken by Japan” during the war. The waiver blocked further efforts by either the United States or individual citizens to seek compensation from the Japanese government.

Historians say the Cold War was to blame for the language of the U.S.-Japanese treaty. They suggest that this country was trying both to mollify those angered by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to obtain permanent military bases in Japan. No such treaty was reached between the United States and Germany, which was divided and managed by the U.S. and its allies after the war.

Like most other survivors of Japanese concentration camps, the Bachleders kept their wartime horrors to themselves when they returned to the United States in late 1945.

The War Claims money totaled $2,224 for Bachleder, $2,282 for his wife and $950.83 for their son. But it didn’t come close to covering the family’s financial loss from the confiscation of their car, mechanics’ tools, cash and other property in the Philippines.

But it was enough for a down payment on the tiny Culver City house that they still occupy. Bachleder soon resurrected his career as an aviation engineer, first with Douglas Aviation and then as a civilian employee of the Point Mugu Navy base.

Aviation work was what led Bachleder to the Philippines in the mid-1930s. He had been married for nearly a year, had a 2-month-old son and was working as a mechanic for Pan American Airways in Manila when World War II broke out.

Within an hour of the bombing of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, he was sent home from work at Nichols Field and instructed to gather his family and hurry to a Red Cross shelter.

It was there that the Bachleders watched the Japanese invasion of Manila three weeks later.

“On New Year’s Eve we stood on the porch of the Red Cross house and watched the Japanese come in by bicycle,” said Frances Bachleder. “On New Year’s Day they came with guns to get us.”

The Bachleders were ordered to take food for three days and report to Santo Tomas University. Bachleder drove there in his 1939 Plymouth and surrendered it to the Japanese.

“It was chaos,” Frances Bachleder said. “At first they didn’t provide us with anything. No blankets, no food. Philippine friends brought food to the gate for us until the Red Cross finally came.” In time, the Japanese set up a kitchen at the camp.

Resorted to Eating Insects and Roots

Women and children were housed in separate dorms and classrooms from men for the first six months. As the invasion of the Philippine islands continued and more American and Allied civilians were taken prisoner, the camp became crowded.

Prisoners were assigned jobs. Bachleder was placed on the garbage detail. His wife’s duty was to hand out three sheets of toilet paper per person at the latrine.

Internees were eventually given permission to build their own lean-tos on the university grounds. Bachleder built one out of four poles and a blanket and the family was reunited.

“In early days of the war, when the Japanese were winning, it wasn’t that bad,” he said. “They set up little stands and sold food and shanty building materials to those who had money. Filipino friends brought food to the gate and left it for us.”

One of his friends began bringing peanuts to Bachleder, who had managed to bring a tiny hand-cranked meat grinder to camp with him. Bachleder set up what would become a life-saving business making peanut butter.

He sold it at first for 30 cents a jar, raising money for extra food and for materials for a bigger shanty. Sometimes he provided peanut butter to his Filipino friends; on those occasions he would slip notes inside the butter to plead for food for his baby.

Lacking milk and living on a diet devoid of salt or sugar, Lou Bachleder Jr. was dangerously underweight.

“I chewed food for him and then put it in his mouth,” his mother recalled.

When the couple found a chicken behind their shanty, they captured it and put it in a cage. They kept every other egg it laid; remaining eggs were sold or traded to other prisoners.

Conditions worsened as the war continued and the Japanese began to lose. Prisoners who tried to escape were beaten and executed, Bachleder said.

The camp’s makeshift stores were shut down. The camp kitchen cut back servings of watered-down rice and fish. The pages of a Chinese yearbook were used when the camp ran out of toilet paper.

Bachleder resorted to scouring the ground for grains of rice dropped by others to feed his family. He collected cockroaches to feed the caged hen. By the end of the war, most in the camp had resorted to eating insects and roots.

Bachleder weighed 85 pounds the night of Feb. 3, 1945, when the American tank rammed into the camp. By coincidence, he and another prisoner were hiding near the gate--using a jerry-built drill made from a screw in a futile effort to open a Japanese soy sauce barrel.

“The tank came through three barbed wire fences and then through the gate. We knew we were free when they started handing out candy bars and cans of butter,” Bachleder recalled--tears welling up at the memory. “I tore open a can with my teeth to give a finger full to my wife and the boy. My face was all bloody from ripping open the can.”

Badly malnourished, Louis Jr. was quickly sent to the U.S. by ship, accompanied by his uncle, an American Merchant Marine. Frances Bachleder gave birth to a daughter (April Foss, now a Chatsworth physical therapist) while she and her husband awaited permission to board a troop ship for home.

The Bachleders have saved a stack of wartime souvenirs--news clippings, camp ration books and latrine passes and copies of a short-lived camp newsletter produced for a time by Santo Tomas prisoners. They also have a collection of letters they’ve written to the U.S. government inquiring about reparations.

The couple are members of a Miami-based group called the Center for Internee Rights Inc. that for years has pressed for congressional action that could lead to additional compensation for camp survivors.

“The U.S. is a guilty party in that they let this happen,” said Gilbert M. Hair, a former Westlake Village investment banker who is founder and executive director of Internee Rights. As an infant, Hair was also a Santo Tomas internee with his mother; his father died on a Japanese slave labor ship.

Hair’s group is starting to receive wide support, including advice from Jewish leaders at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles who are experts on war crimes. “They have won a high level of political support, which is what we need,” Hair said.

Political Support Is Building

Political backing is starting to pay off. A new California law pressed last year by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) allows prisoners of war who were used as forced laborers to sue Japanese companies that were responsible. It waives a statute of limitations that previously had blocked such suits; several claims have already been filed and seven other states have passed or are considering similar laws.

An Assembly joint resolution offered by Assemblyman Mike Honda (D-San Jose) and approved last year also calls for Japan to apologize and pay individual compensation to American internees. Hair’s group is also working with Mark Fabiani--a La Jolla political insider who served as deputy Los Angeles mayor under Tom Bradley and as a special counsel to President Clinton--to help press their case.

The Japanese government, however, considers the matter closed.

A “very formal apology” was issued in 1995 by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama expressing his “feelings of deep remorse” and his “heartfelt apology,” said Kazuo Kadama, minister for public affairs at the Japanese Embassy in Washington.

“Both the United States and the Japanese government share the view that the question of claims was settled completely and finally under the peace treaty signed in San Francisco in 1951,” Kadama added.

The U.S. government agrees with that sentiment, said a State Department spokesman.

The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Thomas S. Foley, four months ago assured the Japanese press that “the 1951 peace treaty contains very explicit language” that bans further claims, said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

The Bachleders, meanwhile, remain hopeful that they and other survivors can eventually find closure to that sad chapter of their lives. “My God no, we won’t give up,” Louis Bachleder said. “We’re fighters.”

Louis Bachleder Jr., now 59 and a San Francisco bank attorney, said he is glad that his parents are persevering now, just as they did 56 years ago.

“Our country didn’t do right by the Japanese Americans during the war, so I don’t have any pain about paying them reparations,” he said.

“It would be OK with me, too, if Japan paid my parents as well.”