This only delayed the inevitable. He was a lean man, and when he did lose weight, it came from muscle and not from any fat. He soon felt himself wasting away and knew that he would soon look just like the others. Men who'd been POWs longer than him looked like corpses, skeletal and covered with ulcerating sores. Several suffered from infections of the scrotum that caused the sac to balloon up several times larger than it should be. Dennis could only guess at their agony.

Chambers tried not to torture himself by thinking about his wife and his home the way so many of the other POWs did. Whenever an unbidden thought did break through his defenses, he blocked it out.

Despite his privations and bleak future, he didn't contemplate escape. After all, where the hell would he go? A white man in the middle of Japan would stick out like a sore thumb. If he tried and was caught, the punishment would be savage and fatal. He and his buddies talked it over. They would wait.

Like every able-bodied American, British, or Australian POW in the camp, Chambers had to work for his meager rations. He and a handful of others had been put to work in one of the small factories on the outskirts of Nagasaki, where he performed menial work under the scrutiny of his masters. He welcomed the work. It broke up the monotony of the days and frequently kept him away from his guards.

Better, many of the civilian workers in the factory were not sadists like the guards and treated him reasonably well. A couple of them even slipped him bits of food from their own meager supplies out of pity for him. He knew he was fortunate to be working where he was. Many POWs were forced to work in the area's coal mines, under extremely harsh and primitive conditions that caused deaths and numerous injuries.