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| Jilin Province |
He had succeeded General Douglas MacArthur as commander of Allied troops in the Philippines when the latter was evacuated to Australia. Wainwright oversaw the drawn-out surrender of the Philippines to Imperial Fascist Japan from May 6 to June 9, 1942. He spent the rest of the war in brutal Japanese POW camps.
Seventy-nine years ago on August 19, 1945, two OSS commandos turned up in Wainwright's Northern Chinese POW camp to tell him the war had ended. He was physically liberated by the Russian Army five days later. And on the 27th he flew out of Mukden to the Philippines and then on to Japan to participate in the official surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.
Earlier in August, the OSS initiated Operation Cardinal to liberate the American and Allied senior officers Japan had captured at the beginning of the war. First held in a series of POW Camp in Formosa, these generals and colonels were transferred to Manchuria in the fall of 1944. Circumstantial evidence suggested that POW officers were being concentrated in a few remote locations to be used as hostages, whereas the enlisted men who were POWs were to be executed as the war became more desperate.
The OSS believed the senior POW officers were with other POWs at a camp in Mukden, Manchukuo, today's Shenyang. When the OSS team liberated Mukden they were stunned to learn that 34 of the most senior officers, including Wainwright, were held over 100 miles northeast of Mukden in Hsian. This sentence regarding Wainwright's location, a variation of which is found in most accounts of Wainwright's rescue, is inexact and generally incorrect.
The coal town of Hsian is identified in various articles on Wainwright's rescue as Sian, Xi'an, or Hsian and located 100 KM and even 100 miles northeast of Mukden. After a lot of research, I can say the correct location is: Hsian (today's Liaoyuan), which is approximately 220.9 km (137.261 miles) northeast of Mukden (today's Shenyang). Liaoyuan is situated on the north bank of the upper Dongliao River. This camp was 100 miles southeast of Zheng Village (today's Shuangliao) that was the initial camp that all the senior POW officers and enlisted men from Formosa were sent to in November 1944. Both towns are in today's Jilin Province.
On December 1, 1944, 34 senior Allied Officers were separated from the rest of POWs from Formosa and moved to Hsian from Zheng Village. There they waited and starved until the OSS, after much mishap, appeared on August 19th. The story of the eventual liberation of the generals there and their return home is well told in this article: The OSS’ Operation Cardinal: Locating General Jonathan Wainwright: The OSS Cardinal Mission located General Jonathan Wainwright at a Japanese prison camp in Manchuria By John Mancini, Warfare History Network, November 2006.
The award of the Medal of Honor had been proposed for Wainwright as early as 1942. MacArthur, however, vehemently opposed it, believing that Corregidor should have held out longer and that Wainwright had surrendered too soon. In 1945, Wainwright was again proposed for the Medal of Honor, and this time MacArthur did not object. It should be noted that MacArthur was never so generous to General Edward P. King who surrendered the peninsula of Bataan on April 9, 1942.
The citation lauds Wainwright's heroism in command of the doomed defenders and reads in part: “…At the repeated risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in his position, he frequented the firing line of his troops where his presence provided the example and incentive that helped make the gallant efforts of these men possible. The final stand on beleaguered Corregidor, for which he was in an important measure personally responsible, commanded the admiration of the Nation’s allies. It reflected the high morale of American arms in the face of overwhelming odds. His courage and resolution were a vitally needed inspiration to the then sorely pressed freedom-loving peoples of the world.”
When freed by the OSS men, Wainwright worried that he was considered a coward, derelict in his duty, by the American people. When they informed him that he was actually a national hero, the emaciated general was incredulous. MacArthur was adamant about having him included in the signing of the surrender document. Wainwright was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City on September 13, 1945, and promoted to the four-star rank of full general. On September 19, 1945, he received the Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman in the Rose Garden of the White House.
