Time for the Gold Medal
STATEMENT
FOR THE RECORD
to the
Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and HouseVeterans' Affairs Committee Joint Hearing
To
Receive Legislative Presentations of Veterans Service Organizations
By
Jan Thompson
President
American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial
Society
12 March 2019
AMERICAN PRISONERS OF WAR OF
JAPAN
CEMENTING A LEGACY
[excerpts]
Today, I want to speak to you
about what it means to “Never Forget” our veterans. The men and women who became POWs of Japan
over 70 years ago fought the early desperate battles of WWII in the Pacific and
suffered some of its worst consequences. Nearly 40 percent did not return home.
Those who survived had the highest rate of post-conflict hospitalizations,
deaths, and psychiatric disorders of any generation of veterans. Their families
endured and inherited their trauma.
If this history is forgotten, so
too will the sacrifices of today’s veterans. It is an obligation to honor our
veterans and to remember appropriately their contribution to our country’s
history.
Before the last American POW of
Japan dies, we believe that the appropriate civic remembrance for them is a
Congressional Gold Medal that recognizes their unique history of perseverance,
valor, and patriotism.
Most important, we ask Congress to approve an accurate and
inclusive Congressional gold medal for the American POWs of Japan. It is a long
overdue symbol of our commitment to veterans of past generations that we will
“never forget.”
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What we ask Congress
We ask Congress to encourage the
Government of Japan to hold to its promises and responsibilities by preserving,
expanding, and enhancing its reconciliation program toward its former American
prisoners. We want to see the trips to Japan continued. We want Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
to publicize the program, its participants, and its achievements. We want to see a commitment to remembrance.
We believe that both countries will be stronger the more we examine our shared
history.
We ask Congress to encourage Japan
to turn its POW visitation program into a permanent Fund supported by Japanese
government and industry. This “Future Fund,” not subject to Ministry of Finance
yearly review, would support research, documentation, reconciliation programs,
and people-to-people exchanges regarding Japan’s history of forced and slave
labor during WWII. Part of the Fund’s educational programming would be the
creation of visual remembrances of this history through museums, memorials,
exhibitions, film, and installations. Most important, the Fund would support
projects among all the arts from poetry, literature, music, dance, and drama to
painting, drawing, film, and sculpture to tell the story to the next
generation.
We
ask Congress to ask and to instruct the U.S. State Department to continue to represent
rigorously the interests of American veterans with Japan. It is only the U.S.
government that can persuade Japan to continue the visitation program, to
create a Future Fund, and to ensure that the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial
Revolution include the dark history of POW slave labor.
We ask Congress to press the
Japanese government to create a memorial at the Port of Moji, where most
of the “Hell ships” docked and unloaded their sick and dying human cargo. The dock already features memorials to the Japanese
soldiers and horses that departed for war from this port. Nowhere in Moji’s
historic district is there mention of the captive men and looted riches
off-loaded onto its docks. This must change.
⌘⌘⌘
Over the past few years, there have been Congressional gold
medals given to groups that included American POWs of Japan. Eight members of
the Doolittle Raiders were POWs, at least one Nisei member of the Military
Intelligence Service was a POW, and nearly all the officers of the Filipino
troops who were awarded Congressional Gold Medals were American.
Unlike previous WWII Congressional Gold Medal award groups
that honor specific service units or ethnicities, the American POWs of Japan
are both men and women from many ethnic groups, religions, services, and
regions. For example:
- The 200th Coast Artillery (AA) on Bataan, the first to fire on the invading Japanese forces, was composed mainly of Hispanic Americans from New Mexico.
- The first tanker to die in WWII was Private Robert Brooks, a black man with the 192nd Tank Battalion from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, who was killed on Nichols Field, Philippines.
- Chinese-American, Eddie Fung, and Japanese-American, Frank Fujita, both fought on Java and were surrendered with the U.S. Army 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, 36th Division (Texas National Guard).
- A statue before the St. Landry Catholic Church in Opelousas, Louisiana memorializes Army Air Corps Chaplain Father LaFleur who sacrificed his life while saving fellow POWs in the sinking of the hellship Shinyo Maru.
- The military nurses captured in the Philippines were the first large group of American women in combat and, counted with the Army and Navy nurses surrendered on Guam, comprised the first group of American military women taken captive and imprisoned by an enemy.
- Over 600 United States Merchant Marines, including one woman Mariner, became prisoners of Imperial Japan. Fifteen percent were killed by Japanese Imperial Navy officers during capture or died in Japanese POW camps.
- The first American POWs of Japan were Marines stationed in China and the last were Navy and Army aviators shot down over Japan.
- An Army Corps of Engineers
Master Sergeant, Aaron Kliatchko, who died aboard a hellship is remembered
as the “Rabbi of Cabanatuan” POW camp in the Philippines where he consoled
Jew and gentile alike.
Seventy-eight years after the start of the War in the
Pacific, it is time to recognize all
those who fought the impossible and endured the unimaginable in the war against
tyranny in the Pacific. Moreover, as I have described
above, the Gold Medal would also recognize that we are the only American
wartime group to have negotiated our own reconciliation with the enemy.
