At Japan's National Press Club October 15, 2015
5th Delegation of American Former
POWs of
Japan
October 11-20, 2014
Anthony (Tony) COSTA,
94, lives in Concord, California, the town in which he was born on January 8,
1920. After graduating from
Mt. Diablo High School, he worked in the
nearby oil refineries. In December 1939, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He
became a member of the legendary 4
th Marine Regiment, also known as
the
“China Marines”,
stationed in Shanghai on Embassy guard duty. In late November 1941, the China
Marines were
transferred
to Olongapo on The Philippines Islands.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii,
December 7, 1941, the most of the
China
Marines were moved to Corregidor Island in the Bay of Manila. On reaching
Corregidor on 29 December, Pfc Costa was assigned to the newly formed 3d
Battalion, Company L to engage in beach defenses until
surrender on May 6, 1942. For three weeks, in the tropical sun with little food or water, the
Japanese kept the POWs at the 92nd Garage area. Taken to Manila on May 25
th,
the survivors of
Siege
of Corregidor were paraded down Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison on what
was called
the "March
of Shame” before the Filipinos and foreign residents
. The following day they were moved by train and foot to the squalid
Cabanatuan
POW Camp. At Cabanatuan, 2,660 POWs died due to poor sanitation,
starvation rations, limited medical care, and abuse. On November 7, 1942, he was taken by the Hellship
Nagato Maru via
Formosa to the Japanese port of Moji, the main disembarkation point for most
POW transport ships. He arrived by train on November 26
th,
Thanksgiving Day, in Osaka. He
remembers that the rags and loincloths that had been adequate in the
Philippines were insufficient for the biting cold found in Japan. The POWs were
never given adequate clothing that first winter. With many of the POWs from
Nagato Maru, Costa worked
for
Nippon Express as a
slave
stevedore in the freight yards in and around the city of Osaka at
Umeda
Bunsho Camp in Osaka (Osaka 2-D UMEDA). In March 1945, after his POW camp
was firebombed, he was transferred to
Osaka
POW Camp 5-B TSURUGA were he was again a slave stevedore for
Nippon Express and Tsuruga
Transportation Company. Costa was liberated in September 1945. During the defense of Corregidor, 72 members of the 4
th
Marines were killed in action. Of the 1,487 members of the 4th Marines captured
on the Philippines Islands, 474 died in captivity. Following
repatriation, Mr. Costa returned to California where he became a heavy
machinery factory worker. In 1949, Mr. Costa built his own house, in which he
still lives, and became the construction inspector of his hometown of Concord.
He received his Purple Heart and Bronze Star 50 years after the fact, but he is
still fighting to receive his back pay for his time as a POW.
POW#:
UNKNOWN
Daniel W. CROWLEY, 92, a Connecticut native lives in
Simsbury, Connecticut.
In 1940, the age of 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air
Corps hoping to “take long trip somewhere at the expense of our country. He was
sent to The Philippines in January 1941 and stationed in Manila at Nichols
Field with the 24
th Pursuit Group, V Interceptor Command, 17
th
Pursuit Squadron. With the st
art of the war after
the after bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was sent to fight on the Bataan
Peninsula as part of
Provisional Air Corps Infantry
Regiment. Although designated as infantry, U.S. Army refuses to this day
to recognize the veterans as such and denies them their Combat Infantry badges.
After the Bataan Peninsula was surrendered April 9, 1942, his unit made their
way to the tip of Bataan and the town of Mariveles to surrender. Refusing to
become prisoners, they hide among rocks on the shore and then made their way to
Corregidor aboard life boats with sailors from various American ships that had
been scuttled in Manila Bay and Mariveles Harbor. On Corregidor he became part
of the
4th Marines regimental reserve under
Maj.
Max Schaeffer working shore defense. On
May 6, 1942, he became a POW of Japan with the
fall of Corregidor. On May
25
th, he and other POWs who were
interned in the 92nd Garage Area were
paraded
through Manila on the “March of Shame.” He was then taken by rail and foot
to the POW Camp
Cabanatuan.
In the summer of 1942,
Crowley was sent to the island of Palawan where he labored with other
POWs building an airstrip.
He was returned
to
Manila in early 1944. On December 14, 1944,
the Japanese, believing an U.S. invasion imminent, herded his friends, the
remaining 150 prisoners at Palawan into a shelter, dumped in gasoline, and set
them on fire while machine-gunning escapees. Some
prisoners did succeed to escape
the massacre, but 139 men were killed. Crowley was sent to
Japan via Formosa on March 24, 1944 aboard the Hellship,
Taikoku
Maru arriving April 3
rd. He was taken to Hitachi then to
Tochigi, Japan where he was a slave laborer mining copper ore for
Furukawa Kogyo. (today’s
Furukawa Company Group) at
Ashio
POW Camp Tokyo 9-B until the end of the war. Returning home, Crowley became
an insurance agent and raised a family. He says that veterans who were held
prisoners of war by the Japanese were stigmatized."Corporations here in
the states thought we were nuts," he said. "The majority of us
re-joined the Army or worked for the postal service." Crowley believes he
enjoyed a good life in Simsbury, but he will never forget the years stolen from
him by the Japanese. "It's a living thing with me," he said. "It's
not ancient history at all." His most recent efforts to recognize those
with whom he served was advocating for the state legislature to name the bridge
on Route 185 in Simsbury the “Bataan Corregidor Memorial Bridge” in memory of
those soldiers who fought alongside Crowley and who lost their lives at the
Battle of Bataan and the Battle of Corregidor. The
dedication
took place on December 7, 2013.
POW#: 101
Warren JORGENSON, 93, lives in Bennington, Nebraska. He grew
up in a small town outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After high school, he
enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1939 and was stationed in Shanghai by May
1940 with the 4
th Marine Regiment, the legendary “
China Marines.”
They were
deployed to the Philippines in November 1941, arriving days before the war
began. He was wounded during the defense of Corregidor.. After the surrender of Corregidor
on May 6, 1942 he was kept for nearly a year on the Island as a POW laborer and buried the dead. He
was moved to Clark Field in 1943 working maintain the air strip.
He was sent to Japan on
August 27, 1944 aboard the Hellship
Noto-Maru. Jorgenson remembers
that there was not
enough room to even stand up as they were stacked together. The tropical heat
created a living hell and then the hatch covers were closed. The hold was
airless and the heat unbearable. Sick, starved, and suffocating the POWs had
only buckets provided for bathroom facilities. In Japan, he
was taken to Sendai #6
(Hanawa) POW camp where he was a slave laborer
for Mitsubishi Goushi Company (today’s Mitsubishi Materials) mining cooper ore. The mine
closed in 1978 and was turned into a museum, the Osarizawa Mine Historical Site
that recounts the 1300-year history of mining the mountain. Visitors can also
go through some of the main tunnels. An amusement park and museum were opened
in 1982 as “Mine Land Osarizawa.” In 2008, the site was
renovated with the amusement section, Cosmo Adventure [sic],
focused on space-themed indoor shooting games. The museum makes no mention of
the slave laborers who worked the mine during the war. After
repatriation, Mr. Jorgenson received a degree in Commercial Science from
Drake University on the G.I. Bill. He then went on to work in the phonograph
music industry first at Capitol Records and then at Musicland.
POW#: 407
Oral C. NICHOLS, 93, lives in Carlsbad, New
Mexico. He is a 1939 graduate of
Woodbury College (now
Woodbury University)
in Burbank, California. Following
graduation, he worked as a bookkeeper and as miner in California. He then
joined Morrison-Knudsen, a Boise, Idaho-based construction company that was working
to upgrade the airfield on Wake Island in the Pacific. When the war started on
December 8, 1941, he participated, as a civilian medic in the
legendary defense
of Wake Island. For nearly two weeks, a garrison of some 400 Marines and a
handful of the 1,500 civilians working on the atoll fought off an invading
Japanese armada. It was the only time during the Pacific War that a Japanese
amphibious assault was repelled. The battle was a rare example of success in
the War's early months. After the island fell on December 23, 1941, the
Japanese considered him and all the civilians as prisoners of war. He was sent
with the majority of POWs in January 1942 to China. The POWs left on Wake were
tasked with finishing the air strip and hard labor. On October 7, 1943, the 98
remaining POWs were bound with barbed wire and machined gunned to death. A
lone, still unknown survivor scratched the date on a rock near the
massacre. He
was tracked down and beheaded. In China, Nichols was first placed at the
Woosung
Camp outside of Shanghai. In
December 1942, he was moved to
Kiangwan another
camp in the area. Nichols typing skills garnered him a clerk’s position at Kiangwan’s
interpreter’s office. The chief interpreter, Isami
Ishihara,
was called the Beast of
the East as he was exceedingly sadistic and was sentenced to death after the
war. Nichols was eventually moved to Japan in May 1945 to
Sendai
Camp #11 Kamakita near
Aomori in Northern
Honshu. There he was a slave laborer in an open pit iron mine for Nippon Mining
(today’s
JX Nippon Mining and
Materials). After repatriation, Nichols worked a variety of jobs in
California and Arizona before moving back to his family’s ranch in New Mexico.
It was not until 1981 that Congress enacted the bill that became a public law
granting Nichols and the other civilians on Wake status as war veterans and
provided them with honorable discharges and attendant benefits as U.S. Navy
veterans.
POW#: 4410 and
4406
William R. “Bill” SANCHEZ, 96, a California native lives in Monterey Park,
California. He grew up on the Eastside of Los Angeles
. He went on
to study international trade and finance at Woodbury College (now Woodbury
University) in Burbank, California
and enrolled in graduate classes at the University of Southern California. Believing
that war was on the horizon, in 1940 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and asked to
go to The Philippines. "I figured the Philippines is
adventure," Sanchez recalled. He became
an Army Sergeant with 59th Coast
Artillery Regiment, Battery
“I” assigned to Corregidor first working intelligence on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff
and then harbor defense against the invading Japanese. He remembers
he was in combat continually for five months until the island was surrendered
on May 6, 1942. Battery “I” was the first to
fire on the enemy. After surrender, he and fellow POW Harry Corre appeared in
the famous staged
photo at the entrance of Malinta Tunnel of the
American surrenders with their hands in the air to Japanese forces. He,
along with all the Americans captured on Corregidor, was forced to billet for three weeks
at the
92nd
Garage area on island with no protection from the sun and little food or
water before they were moved to the main island. In Manila, the Japanese
forced the survivors of
Siege
of Corregidor onto what is now called
the
"March
of Shame” a “parade” through Manila from Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid
Prison.
From there, he was taken to the POW
camp at Cabanatuan. Sanchez
was among the first group of POWs moved to Japan. Deep in the cramped and
fifthly hold of Hellship the Tottori Maru,
Sanchez began his voyage to Japan on October 8, 1942. The ship traveled to
Formosa, then Korea, and finally arrived in Moji, Japan on November 11th. In
Japan, he was sent to Omori Tokyo Base Camp #1 work on reclaiming land. Sanchez also worked as a slave stevedore for Nippon Tsuun (today’s Nippon Express) at the railway yards in Tokyo. Returning home,
he worked for various companies in
international trade. His work found him returning to Japan several times. He is
an avid Los Angeles Angels baseball fan.
POW#:
UNKNOWN
Jack W. SCHWARTZ, 98, lives
in Hanford, California. He graduated
from
Hollywood
High School when he was 15 years old. At the
California Institute of Technology, he earned both his BA and MS degrees in civil engineering. He worked at
various engineering jobs until joining the U.S. Navy in 1940 as a lieutenant
junior grade in the Civil Engineering Corps. After Schwartz’s first Navy assignment
at Pearl Harbor, he was transferred to Guam in January 1941. On Guam, he was a Public
Works officer, in charge of maintenance and inspecting new construction. The
Japanese Navy attacked Guam several hours after Pearl Harbor on December 8,
1941.
The
Battle of Guam lasted barely two days with the tiny Marine and Navy
garrison quickly overwhelmed by Japan’s invading forces. On 10 December 1941,
Guam became the first American territory formally surrendered to an enemy in
WWII. One month later, Schwartz and most of the officers on Guam were boarded
aboard Mitsui’s passenger ship
Argentina
Maru and transported to the Japanese port of Tadotsu on the island of
Shikoku. Arriving in Japan on January 16, 1942, he was taken to the
Zentsuji
POW Camp about 400 miles west of Tokyo. During
WWII, it held mainly officers plus enlisted ranks from Guam & Wake Island.
It was used by the Japanese as a “show camp” for the Red Cross with marginally
better conditions than others. At the camp, he was repeatedly beaten and put on
reduced rations for asking camp officials for better food and medical supplies.
Officers did not have to work and he passed his time doing calculus problems
and macramé. Enlisted POWs at the camp were slave stevedores for
Nippon
Express (still in operation under the same name)
at the Sakaide Rail Yards and the Port of Takamatsu. In September 1942, he was
transferred to
Tokyo
2B Kawasaki (Mitsui Madhouse). Again, as an officer, he was not required to
work and did not participate in the slave stevedore work at the camp. However,
he was the senior officer and thus was in charge of recording work hours and
pay (most of which was never distributed). He was returned to Zentsuji in
August of 1944. The camp was dismantled and he was sent in June 1945 to do
subsistence farming at POW Camp 11-B
Rokuroshi
(Camp Mallette) in the Japanese Alps. With severely restricted rations,
overcrowding, and no winter clothes, all the men at the camp were convinced
that they would not survive the winter. Hidden in the mountains, the POW camp
was not liberated until September 8, 1945. After the war, Schwartz remained in
the Navy, retiring in 1962. In Hanford, California he was Public Works Director and City Engineer for 18
years. Since retiring in 1980, Schwartz has
been on many city and county work groups, including eight years as a City
Planning Commissioner and five years on the Kings County Grand Jury.
POW#: 171
Darrell D. STARK, 91, lives in Stafford Springs,
Connecticut. He grew up in a large migrant labor family in Oklahoma and joined
the U.S. Army when he was 17 on March 5, 1941. He was assigned to the 31st
Infantry
Regiment United States, M company and was immediately sent to the
Philippines Islands aboard the USAT Republic. He did his basic training on the
Philippines where he was assigned to a heavy weapons company and was a weapons carrier and
runner. With the Japanese invasion of The Philippines on December 8, 1941, the
31st Infantry covered the withdrawal of American and Filipino forces to the
Bataan Peninsula. Despite starvation, disease, no supplies, obsolete weapons,
and often dud ammunition, the peninsula’s defenders fought the Japanese to a
standstill for four months. On April 9, 1942, Bataan was surrendered to Japan.
At the time, Stark was delirious with malaria in
Bataan
Hospital #2. He did not participate in the 65-mile Bataan Death March and
was instead transported by truck to
Bilibid
Prison in Manila. From there, he was eventually sent to
Cabanatuan.
Stark was soon sent to work in the
Davao
Penal Colony, a prison camp on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao,
where he and 2,000 other prisoners farmed 1,000 acres of rice and 600 acres of
fruits and vegetables. Japan closed the camp on Mindanao in late spring of
1944. On
July 4, 1944 Stark
was sent to Japan
with 1,024
Allied POWs aboard the Hellship
Sekiho Maru
(also known as the Canadian Inventor
or the Mati Mati Maru or Wait, Wait Ship). After 62 days, and stops in Formosa and Japan, the freighter arrived at
the Japanese port of Moji on September 1, 1944. From there, he was sent to
Nagoya
#5-B Yokkaichi POW camp where
became a slave laborer at a
copper foundry owned by Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha in Nagoya, a port city south of
Tokyo. Much of the work involved melting down bells seized from churches. Other
Allied POW slave laborers at this POW camp mined coal or manufactured sulfuric
acid for the company. The Yokkaichi facility and company,
Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha (ISK),
where Stark slaved still exists. After an earthquake in May 1945, he was among the POWs moved to
Nagoya-07B-Toyama to work as slave laborers
for Nihon Sotatsu (Nippon Soda Company. Ltd.). He was liberated on September 5, 1945.
Stark returned to the United States and spent 18 months in a San Francisco
hospital recovering from disease and injuries. According
to Army records, roughly half of his regiment, 1,155 men, died in
captivity. He moved to Connecticut working several jobs until he became
Deputy Jailer for Tolland County. He went on to become a Captain with the
State of Connecticut Department
of Corrections, where he set up the Department’s Correctional
Transportation Unit (CTU). Since his retirement
in 1972, he has spoken widely to students about the
history of the defense of the Philippines and to veterans who suffer, like him,
from PTSD.
POW#: 563
