Events of interest this week to the POW of Japan Community

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH is National POW/MIA Recognition Day
You can get this year's poster here free

There are still 47,177 missing from the War in the Pacific

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16TH is Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Dedication

The Memorial, commissioned by Congress in 1999, honors the legacy of the World War II Supreme Allied Commander and nation's 34th President.
Eisenhower served as MacArthur's assistant in Washington and his advisor in the Philippines in the 1930s.
See here for more details

C-Span interview with Susan Eisenhower about her new book about her grandfather, How Ike Led.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 is The Bataan Death March and The Sack of Cement Cross Seminar
The National Prisoner of War Museum at the Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia is hosting a virtual event about the historic cross at Camp O'Donnell. The cross is exhibited at the Museum. 
PANEL MEMBERS
Gia Wagner, Superintendent, National Prisoner of War Museum
Randy Olson (Moderator), Filmmaker, son of Col. John Olson
Chris Schaefer, Filmmaker/Historian
Fred Baldassarre, Historian
Dan Crowley, 98 yr old veteran of Bataan, former P.O.W.
John Eakin, Specialist, Identification of MIA/KIA remains
REGISTER HERE
WATCH AN OLSON VIDEO ABOUT CAMP O'DONNELL HERE ON FACEBOOK

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18-19  is the HOME ALIVE IN ‘45: PIVOTAL DECISIONS TO END THE WAR SYMPOSIUM
The Admiral Nimitz Foundation and National Museum of the Pacific War in Texas holds its 33rd Annual Symposium virtually. This year – the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII – the focus is on the strategies, events and impacts of the end of WWII in the Pacific. See and hear five experts in their fields speak and take your questions, a lively roundtable discussion with all five speakers, and stimulating breakouts that connect the dots between WWII and today's concerns.
Book discounts and an auction.

SPEAKERS

Marc Gallicchio - Unconditional Surrender: An Introduction to the End of WWII
Richard B. Frank – Downfall: The Stark Realities of the Atomic Bomb
Craig Symonds - The Legacy of Admiral Nimitz in Today’s Japan
Noriko Kawamura - A Conflicted Man: Emperor Hirohito and the End of the War with the United States
James Hornfischer - Revelation and Reckoning: Total War in the Pacific 1944-1945
Plus 3 concurrent breakouts:
Race in the Military Then and Now, led by Lt. General Vincent Stewart, USMC (Ret.)
The Pandemic—In Search of an Answer, led by Rob Havers, Ph.D.
The Evolving Roles of Women in the Military led by Major General Angela Salinas (Ret.)

REGISTER HERE 

EVENT ABOUT CAMP O'DONNELL

On Thursday, September 17 from 7:00-8:30pm (EDT), a day before the upcoming annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day. The National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia is hosting a virtual event about 

The Bataan Death March 

and 

The Sack of Cement Cross 

This cross was made by POWs in memory of the 1,547 who died at Camp O’Donnell. The cross is exhibited at the National POW Museum. 

PANEL MEMBERS

Gia Wagner, Superintendent, National Prisoner of War Museum

Randy Olson (Moderator), Filmmaker, son of Col. John Olson

Chris Schaefer, Filmmaker/Historian

Fred Baldassarre, Historian

Dan Crowley, 98 yr old veteran of Bataan, former POW

John Eakin, Specialist, Identification of MIA/KIA remains

REGISTER HERE 

Intergenerational Trauma of POWs

Andersonville, GA

What Civil War soldiers can teach us about how trauma is passed from generation to generation

Study shows that severe paternal hardship as a prisoner of war (POW) led to high mortality among sons, but not daughters, born after the war.

By MELISSA HEALY

Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2018

An experience of life-threatening horrors surely scars the person who survives it. It also may have a corrosive effect on the longevity and health of that person’s children and, in some cases, on the well-being of generations beyond.

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The latest evidence of trauma’s long shadow comes from the families of American Civil War veterans. Focused on the children of Union soldiers who were held in Confederate prisoner of war camps, it offers tantalizing clues about the means by which a legacy of misery is transmitted from parent to child — as well as a way to disrupt that inheritance.

After tracing the births and deaths of nearly 10,000 offspring of Union combatants, researchers found that the sons of men who served time as POWs lived shorter lives than the sons of men who were not held captive. They also lived much shorter lives than their brothers who were born before the war began, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

REPORT: Intergenerational transmission of paternal trauma among US Civil War ex-POWs

UCLA economic historian Dora L. Costa inherited stewardship of a trove of Civil War service documents in 2013 after the death of her mentor, Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel. She had always assumed the records would tell a story of how education, class and economic differences influenced the adjustment of former soldiers and their families back to civilian life.

“I was wrong,” Costa said.

Instead, she found evidence to suggest that no matter how poor or prosperous his background, a father’s extreme hardship and privation alter the function of his genes in ways that can be passed on to his children.

In the annals of organized human suffering, the POW camps of the latter half of the Civil War rank way up there. For the first two years of the conflict, the North and the South held informal POW swaps. After the swaps ceased in 1863, desperation among Confederate commanders and indignation among leaders of the Union prompted both sides to deprive their prisoners of food, medicine, sanitation and shelter. As a result, hunger, overcrowding, cold and pestilence killed close to 16% of POWs from the North and 12% of POWs from the South.

The conditions at one of the most notorious Confederate prison camps — Andersonville in southwest Georgia — were particularly well-documented. Built for 10,000 people, Andersonville held more than 45,000 Union soldiers during the 14 months it operated, and 29% of them died of starvation and disease before they could be released. The camp’s commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz, was tried and hanged after the Confederate surrender in April 1865.

The fates of the survivors who staggered north to resume their lives as husbands and fathers were also well-documented. And like many large groups of trauma victims studied by researchers, these veterans and their children told a powerful story.

Drawing on thousands of handwritten military and pension records preserved in the National Archives, as well as on U.S. Census data from the era, Costa’s team pieced together the fates of the children of Union soldiers who survived the war and lived at least until 1890.

The researchers identified offspring of 1,999 Union soldiers who were held as POWs — more than half of them at Andersonville — before returning home. They also found the children of 7,810 Union soldiers who survived the war without being captured by the South.

On average, Northern veterans who spent time in Confederate POW camps had 3.3 children, while those who avoided the camps had 3.1 children.

The differences between the two groups were stark — at least for the sons.

After reaching the age of 45 — old enough to see the effects of any inherited factors that might influence longevity — the sons of POWs were roughly 11% more likely to die at any given age than were the sons of men who had not been held prisoner.

In an even more telling comparison, the researchers turned up 342 POWs who had at least one son conceived before the war began and at least one more born after the war ended. The researchers found that, at any age after 45, the younger brothers were more than twice as likely to die than their older brothers had been when they were the same age. (With only 1,067 sons in this part of the analysis, the researchers said this finding should be interpreted with caution.)

The shorter lifespans of the POWs’ sons didn’t become evident until they had reached what, in that period, would have been late middle age. Though death records were not uniformly detailed, these premature deaths were largely attributable to cerebral hemorrhages and cancer, the researchers reported.

The longevity gap remained after Costa and her colleagues accounted for a welter of socioeconomic factors that might drive differences in lifespan, such as family real-estate holdings and occupational class.

None of these patterns were evident among the daughters of the Union soldiers. That led the study authors to dismiss the idea that the psychological legacy of the POW camps could account for the differences. If a father’s trauma resulted in family violence, paternal absence or emotional distance, the effects would likely be seen in daughters as well as sons, they reasoned. And they weren’t.

The fact that sons, but not daughters, appeared to have inherited some life-shortening bit of their father’s misery does suggest that a genetic actor may be at work — one that is passed along with the Y chromosome, Costa said.

Epigenetics also might be at work here, she added. That’s the chemical signaling process by which genes turn on and off in different tissues at different times, often in response to environmental factors like food supply. While epigenetic marks don’t alter a person’s genetic code, they can profoundly alter how that code is expressed. And they appear to powerfully influence the expression of genes that are passed on to a growing embryo.

Consider the evidence from a series of studies tracking several generations in the isolated Swedish community of Overkalix, Costa said. That research has linked parents’ food availability to the midlife health of their children and grandchildren. Those studies’ complex findings have shown that dietary abundance or scarcity at specific points in time exert sharply different influences on men and women and their progeny. They’ve also furnished evidence that dietary stress may transmit certain vulnerabilities to future generations through paternal DNA.

Other studies of traumatized groups have found evidence that the experience turns genes on and off in ways that are carried down to the next generation and beyond.

In the nine months before the Allies defeated the Nazis in May 1945, Germany blocked all food supplies to the Dutch and caused a famine that killed 20,000 people in the Netherlands. Decades later, researchers would find that, in middle age, the children of Dutch women who were pregnant during that period — daughters especially — went on to suffer higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and schizophrenia. They also died earlier than their compatriots who were born before or after the famine. Six decades after their birth, the Dutch famine offspring still bore distinctive epigenetic signs of stress linked to poorer health.

Another study of Finnish children evacuated abruptly from their homes in the midst of World War II found that the daughters of evacuees were more than twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mood disorder than were their female cousins whose mothers had not been evacuated. (There was no such relationship for sons.)

SEE ALSO: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes: New finding is clear example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children, The Guardian, August 15, 2015.

The new research on Civil War soldiers builds on this work by offering an intriguing bit of hope: evidence not only for the corrosive power of paternal stress, but also for the possible role of maternal nutrition in countering it.

The life-shortening effect of a father’s POW status was magnified for the sons who were born in April, May and June, when food supplies tended to be leanest. But that effect virtually disappeared among sons born during September, October and November, when harvests are in and food is typically more plentiful.

This disparity jibes with studies in animals that have shown the power of dietary supplementation before and during pregnancy to counter worrisome epigenetic effects, Costa said.

In an era when food is mostly plentiful, the lessons from an earlier America may not seem relevant, Costa acknowledged. But supporting the nutrition of childbearing women in communities under stress seems like a no-brainer, said Costa.

“Maternal nutrition seems like a safe and do-no-harm policy, and it is likely to have positive effects,” she said.

Exhibit “We Can Forgive But Never Forget” Opens at Andersonville National Historic Site

Press Release

Date: May 11, 2012
Contact: Bridget A. Beers, 229 924-0343

A new temporary exhibit We Can Forgive But Never Forget is on display at the Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site. This exhibit coincides with the 70th Anniversary of the fall of the Philippines. The objects displayed are from prisoners held by the Japanese during World War II who fought on Bataan and Corregidor.

Seventy years ago the men on Bataan and Corregidor fought to preserve our way of life in World War II.These men, living on less than half rations, suffering from tropical diseases and low on ammunition, were surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942 on Bataan. On May 6, 1942 Corregidor and the rest of the Philippines were surrendered. Their valiant fighting delayed the Japanese invasion of the Pacific for six months, long enough for Allied Troops to regroup, train, and prepare for the systematic retrieval of Pacific islands and countries lost to the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Though hopeful that they would be treated as prisoners according to the Geneva Convention at surrender, the troops instead were considered captives. The Japanese did not abide by the Geneva Convention in regards to feeding, housing, and humane care. Men died by the thousands from starvation, dehydration, and illnesses like dysentery and malaria. Many men who survived a grueling march to Camp O'Donnell would only succumb to death due the lack of food, water, sanitary conditions, and shelter. Many did not survive this perilous march, known now as the Bataan Death March.Thousands died from the grueling march and at the hands of Japanese guards.

Thousands of American prisoners of war were eventually transported on "hell ships" to other locations including Japan where they were used as slave labor in mines, manufacturing plants, and shipyards. Americans and other prisoners of war were also used to construct the Thai-Burma Railway, made famous in the novel The Bridge On The River Kwai and the subsequent movie.The exhibit documents the life of American prisoners of war in the Philippines and Japan through photographs, diaries and items used in the daily struggle to survive.

Andersonville National Historic Site is located 10 miles south of Oglethorpe, GA and 10 miles northeast of Americus, GA on Georgia Highway 49. The site features the National Prisoner of War Museum, Andersonville National Cemetery and the site of the historic Civil War prison, Camp Sumter. ­Andersonville National Historic Site is a unit of the National Park System and serves as a memorial to all American prisoners of war. Park grounds are open from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. with the museum opening at 9:00 a.m. Admission is free. For more information on the park, call 229 924-0343, visit on the WEB or find us on Facebook.