National POW/MIA Recognition Day 2021

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National POW/MIA Recognition Day - September 20, 2019

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USS Missouri (BB-43) Forever

Today, on the 75th anniversary of her commissioning, the famous American battleship USS Missouri (BB-43), will sail again via the nation's mailstream with the issuance of the USS Missouri Forever stamps.  The U.S. Postal Service dedicated the stamps today during a ceremony on her deck at the Battleship Missouri Memorial pier side in Pearl Harbor. The public is asked to share the news on social media using the hashtag #USSMissouriStamps.

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USS Missouri Battleship Sails Again on US Postage Stamp

"The USS Missouri is one of the most famous Naval battleships to ever sail the sea and now the Postal Service is proud to add her to our roster of commemorative stamps," said Jeffrey C. Johnson, U.S. Postal Service acting enterprise analytics vice president, who dedicated the stamp. "As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, I had the honor to serve in the United States Navy and I recognize the importance this great ship brings to American history and this Forever stamp will continue to help tell that vital story."

Joining Johnson in the ceremony was USS Missouri Memorial Association President and CEO Mike Carr, Rear Adm. Brian P. Fort, U.S. Navy Region Hawaii, and Rear Adm. Samuel Cox, US Navy (Retired), Director, Naval History and Heritage Command, Curator of the Navy.

The USS Missouri was commissioned on June 11, 1944. As a fast battleship, she was affectionately nicknamed "Mighty Mo." She was heavily armed and armored and capable of very high speeds for a vessel her size.

She joined the military efforts of the United States in the Pacific theater of operations during the last months of World War II. On Sept. 2, 1945, in a ceremony that was broadcast around the world, USS Missouri played one of the most momentous roles in the conflict when military officials from the Allied powers and Imperial Japan convened on her deck and signed the documents confirming Japan's surrender and ending the war.

USS Missouri earned numerous combat awards and citations during her decades of service, which also included deployments during the Korean War and Operation Desert Storm. Decommissioned for the second and final time in 1992 and removed from the Navy's ship registry in 1995, USS Missouri now rests as a memorial and museum at the Battleship USS Missouri Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The stamp art depicts USS Missouri from a low vantage point almost at sea level, cutting through the water at a moderate speed commensurate with entering or leaving port. Large and imposing in the frame, USS Missouri is shown in the disruptive camouflage she wore from her commissioning until a refit in early 1945. Clouds loom in the background, tinged with gold and rose from the sun's rays.

Designed by art director Greg Breeding, the stamp features a digital illustration created by Dan Cosgrove.

The USS Missouri stamp is being issued as a Forever stamp. This Forever stamp will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce price.  

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the Postal Store at usps.com/shop , by calling 800-STAMP24 (800-782-6724), by mail through USAPhilatelic, or at Post Office locations nationwide. DIRECT LINK TO ORDER   https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/uss-missouri-S_478704

Merry Christmas

Never Forget

By George Stanley Gimson, Chungkai POW Camp, Thailand, 1943

Please help support my research and advocacy for the POWs of Japan

All donations tax deductible

Palawan Massacre Anniversary

At noon on December 14, 1944, 150 American POWs building an airstrip on Palawan Island in the Philippines were sent to their recently constructed air raid trenches. Quickly, the Japanese troops doused them with buckets of airplane fuel and set them afire with flaming torches, followed by hand grenades and machine gun fire. Miraculously, 11 men escaped to the sea and were rescued by Filipino guerrillas.

Never Forget

Don Schloat (d. 2010), a San Diego artist and veteran who was a prisoner at the camp before the mass murder there, was the driving force behind a 2009 memorial at the site of the killings. With the help of the municipal government of Puerto Princesa City, Palawan’s capital, a permanent monument now graces a city park to honor the men who were slain (above).

Survivor's Story
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The massacre had haunted Schloat for decades. He completed a series of 77 paintings that depict the slaughter in abstract, impressionistic and realistic forms. Disappointed that the US government never erected a memorial, he took it upon himself to design and place a monument in Puerto Princesa City in 2009.

The site of the massacre actually has had a small monument that displays the names of the handful of survivors — Schloat’s name is mistakenly included — but there had been no official memorial to those who were killed.

The new one is a simple obelisk with bronze faceplates that tells the story of what happened and bears the names of the men who died there. A bronze statue created by Schloat sits atop the memorial. It depicts a tortured male figure writhing in pain as flames rise from his feet.

Schloat had been an Army medic at Bataan before being imprisoned at Palawan early in the war. Nearly two years before the massacre, Schloat tried to escape but was quickly captured and sent to Bilibid, a POW camp in Manila.

He spent the rest of the war there, racked with dysentery, beriberi, pellagra and scurvy. He learned of the massacre after he was liberated Feb. 4, 1945.

For an accurate accounting of all the POWs who were killed and survived see HERE.

MORE

Books of the Thai-Burma Death Railway

Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American Pows in Burma, 1942-1945 by Robert S. LaForte (Author), Ronald E. Marcello (Editor) (1993)

River Kwai Railway: The Story of the Burma-Siam Railroad by C. Kinvig (2005)

These two books are considered the most rigorous in presenting how the railway was built and the workers and slaves were treated.


The famous illustrator Ronald Searle who drew cartoons for the New Yorker was a British POW of Japan on the Death Railway. Another British POW Jack Chalker was an accomplished artist who also recorded his experience through drawings.


To the Kwai—and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 by Ronald Searle  (2007)

Burma Railway: Original War Drawings of POW by Jack Chalker (2007)

The two most famous books, one fiction and one non-fiction, about POWs surviving the Thai-Burma Death Railway are:


Railway Man A POWs Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness by Eric Lomax (2008)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Memories of Christmas Past

And Hopes of a Christmas Future

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Makeshift Catholic Church on the Thai-Burma Death Railway Chungkai, Thailand, 1943

Pencil on paper drawing (6.4 x 13.6 cm) by Jack B. Chalker

British bombardier with the Royal Field Artillery, captured Singapore February 1942

Faces of WWII

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Ichiro Sudai trained to be a kamikaze. Roscoe Brown was a commander in the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American military aviators. Uli John lost an arm serving in the German army but ultimately befriended former enemy soldiers as part of a network of veterans—"people who fought in the war and know what war really means." These are some of the faces and stories in the remarkable Veterans (144 pages), the outcome of a worldwide project by Sasha Maslov (Interview) to interview and photograph the last surviving combatants from World War II. 

Soldiers, support staff, and resistance fighters candidly discuss wartime experiences and their lifelong effects in this unforgettable, intimate record of the end of a cataclysmic chapter in world history and tribute to the members of an indomitable generation. Veterans is also a meditation on memory, human struggle, and the passage of time.

Unearthing Rare Second World War Musical

The New Yorker reported in its January 9th issue, that director Tom Ridgely, of the theatre troupe Waterwell, will mount “Blueprint Specials” Jan. 6-11, on the hangar deck of the Intrepid.

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum | Pier 86, Twelfth Ave. at 46th St. | 212-245-0072

A few years before writing “Guys and Dolls,” which premièred in 1950, Frank Loesser put his sizable talents to work for Uncle Sam, when the U.S. Army hired him to collaborate on a series of musicals to be performed by and for the troops. Commissioned by the Special Services Division to boost morale, these “Blueprint Specials” came with a script, a score, and instructions for easy assemblage. (“The gags and situations are of the type to hit the GI funnybone. . . . The scenery can be knocked together in a jiffy from scrap materials found in even the loneliest outpost.”) Loesser, who had been writing lyrics for Hollywood before the war, cut his teeth crafting songs for camp shows like “About Face” and “Hi, Yank!”; a 1951 Billboard profile proclaimed that “the army made a composer—a one-man songwriter—out of Frank Loesser.”

Many of the scripts were lost to time, but the director Tom Ridgely, of the theatre troupe Waterwell, has unearthed four of them—all composed principally by Loesser between 1944 and 1945—and will mount them Jan. 6-11, on the hangar deck of the Intrepid. Ridgely spent months hunting down the scripts from various libraries and combining them into a full-length compilation. Much of the story will come from “P.F.C. Mary Brown,” written in 1944 for the newly formed Women’s Army Corps, in which the goddess Athena descends from Mt. Olympus to enlist as a private. The Broadway actors Laura Osnes and Will Swenson will lead a cast of thirty-four, consisting of both civilians and military performers, whom Ridgely found through veterans’ groups by way of Army Entertainment, the modern-day equivalent of Special Services. They’ll be joined by a fourteen-piece jazz orchestra and eleven dancers from the Limón Dance Company, who have reconstructed original Blueprint ballets by the choreographer José Limón.

This will be the first staging of these musicals since 1945—and the first ever for the American public.

Words cannot see - Abe's Pearl Harbor

Anemone 
Kazuhiko Kuwata 

Views Of War Museum Directors Split Over Abe's Pearl Harbor Visit

Tokyo, Dec. 29 (Jiji Press)--The directors of three museums focusing on war history in Japan expressed different views on Wednesday about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Pearl Harbor on Tuesday.

Kazushige Todaka, the 68-year-old director of the Kure Maritime Museum, better known as Yamato Museum, in the western prefecture of Hiroshima, described Abe's visit as "very good." "It was meaningful that the leaders of Japan and the United States together mourned for the victims" of the 1941 Japanese attack on the Hawaiian harbor, Todaka said.

He supported the absence of an apology for the attack in Abe's speech delivered in Pearl Harbor, saying that "people can't blame one side or the other for a war that requires reflection, not apology." Abe's Pearl Harbor visit was "remarkable in terms of history," Todaka said.

Katsumoto Saotome, the 84-year-old director of the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, in Japan's capital, expressed concerns over the emphasis on the Japan-U.S. alliance in Abe's speech, terming it "a military alliance." The words "tolerance" and "reconciliation," both used in Abe's speech, sounded "hollow," Saotome said, referring to the Japanese government's resumption on Tuesday of work to build a new military facility in Okinawa Prefecture to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma air station there.

"I think apologies to people in China and the Korean Peninsula, which Japan invaded and colonized, should be made first," added Saotome, who also works as a novelist.

"I felt (Abe's visit) was like a ceremony, themed 'reconciliation without apology,' jointly organized by Japan and the United States," said Seiichiro Kuboshima, the 75-year-old director of a gallery that collects artworks by students who died in war, in Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, central Japan[Mugonkan or Silent Museum]

"The fundamental contradiction of avoiding an apology led to words with no power," Kuboshima said, referring to Abe's Pearl Harbor speech.

"Japan could join a war for the United States," he warned. Abe "lacked a humble attitude" after Japan made the mistake of supporting World War II in the past, he added.

A POW Merry Christmas

Painting by Gustav Potthoff survivor of Bridge over the River Kwai

Prisoner of war Potthoff, 94, used art to convey life in captivity

The Republic, Columbus, IN, 12/25/16 

Gustav T. Potthoff, a Columbus resident known for his paintings and the brutal conditions he endured as a World War II prisoner of war, has died.

He died at his home Thursday at age 94. Potthoff is survived by his wife, Adele; and their two children. Services are pending at Barkes, Weaver & Glick Funeral Homes.

Potthoff moved to Columbus in 1965 to begin a career with Cummins Engine Co. It was over the ensuing years that local residents learned of the cruelty he suffered, and later the joy and catharsis he experienced in creating artwork.

Gustav Potthoff created this painting of an angel he said was by his side while he was a prisoner 

in World War II, and that follows him everywhere. Potthoff died Thursday at age 94.

He was born in Indonesia March 11, 1922, on the island of Maluku, near New Guinea and Australia, and raised in a Dutch colonial orphanage. Potthoff was a mechanic in a Dutch Indies Army battalion when he was captured by Japanese forces in 1941. Potthoff and about 1,800 other soldiers were sent to Burma to work on the Burma-Thailand railroad project that would later become widely known in the movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” The movie was fictional but based on real-life events.

Potthoff was a prisoner for 3½ years. He suffered from cholera, dysentery and pneumonia. He saw fellow prisoners beaten, killed at random, starved and become ill. When he was freed in 1945, only 300 of the original 1,800 prisoners he was with had survived.

After his release, Potthoff went to Holland, but in 1962 he immigrated to the United States — specifically Indianapolis. Three years later he arrived in Columbus with the help of First Christian Church as his sponsor.

In 1986, Potthoff and his wife became American citizens.

It was after Gus Potthoff retired from Cummins in 1987 that he used painting to depict memories of his time as a prisoner of war, including the forced labor of constructing the railroad. They were a way to tell what happened during his imprisonment and remember those who didn’t survive. His paintings often included images of elephants, spirits of the dead, the lush countryside, railroads, bridges and angels.

“The angels are who was looking out for me. They’re still looking out for me,” Potthoff told The Republic in 2012.

He painted many works, but never kept count of how many. Potthoff never sold his works; he always gave them away.

Potthoff’s works were displayed throughout the community, such as at IUPUC, YES Cinema, the Columbus Learning Center, the Bartholomew County Public Library and the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum.

He was a familiar figure at the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum at Columbus Municipal Airport, where he was a member of the 95ers, a group of volunteers engaged in veterans support activities.

Potthoff’s contributions to the community and his story of survival earned the admiration of local residents, who made sure he received the honor he deserved and help when needed.

When climbing the steps to his front porch had become a difficult labor, two fellow members in the 95ers — Wendell Ross and Pete Jenkins — built a ramp up those steps for their friend.

“We didn’t look on it as a chore,” Ross, former manager of Columbus Municipal Airport and a U.S. Navy veteran, told The Republic in 2012. “Gus has gone through so much in his life and served as an inspiration to anyone who ever met him. It was really a labor of love.”

Sept. 16, 2016, marked the third consecutive year that Bartholomew County honored local residents such as Potthoff, who were prisoners of war or listed as missing in action. They were honored at a local observance of national POW-MIA Recognition Day, which is the third Friday of every September.

Organizer Robert Miller said it’s important to honor, remember and never forget these veterans.

Ben Steele In Memoriam

ADBC-MS President Jan Thompson 

gives an eulogy at the Steele memorial

Ben Steele - a Bataan Death March survivor whose art helped him maintain his sanity as a prisoner of war of Japan during WWII as well helped him forgive his captors - died in Montana on Sunday, September 25, 2015. He was 98. He had been in hospice care for more than a year.

It seemed like the entire state came out for his memorial service on October 4th at the Montana Pavilion at MetraPark. The 2,000 seat venue was full and the 90-minute service broadcast live. Montana's Governor Steve Bullock ordered flags across the state a half-staff for the day and issued a proclamation:

I hereby order all flags flown in the State of Montana to be flown at half-staff on Tuesday, October 4th, 2016, in memory of the life of Benjamin Charles Steele, WWII Veteran, Bataan Death March survivor, devoted educator, and artist. 

Ben Steele was a Montanan of immeasurable character who portrayed the courage of his generation with a sketchbook and a joyful laugh. He taught all of us never to give up on the importance of inspiring future generations after overcoming incredible adversity.

Steele was born on Nov. 17, 1917, in the small Montana town of Roundup and grew up riding horses, roping cattle and occasionally delivering supplies to the well-known western artist Will James. “His parents told him not to hang out much with Will James because he was a drinker, but Dad never said a bad word about him,” his daughter Julie Jorgenson told The Billings Gazette.

In October 1941, US Army Air Corps Private Steele arrived at Clark Field in the Philippines to join the air crews maintaining the war planes arriving from America. On December 8th, Japan began its invasion of the Philippines by bombing Clark and other US air bases. After the near total destruction of the American air force on the Philippine Islands, Steele and other airmen were evaluated on December 24th and sent to fight with the US Army Infantry on the Bataan Peninsula. He and all the troops on Bataan were surrendered on April 9, 1942.

Along with thousands of Filipino and American soldiers, he endured the 65-mile Bataan Death March under a scorching tropical sun up the Bataan peninsula to a make-shift POW camp at Camp O'Donnell in Capas. Along the way, the men were robbed, bayoneted, starved, beaten and killed. All suffered from four months of desperate fighting from malnutrition, exhaustion, dysentery, and malaria. Over 10,000 Filipinos and 600 Americans died on the March.

Ben Steele

The death rate escalated at the POW camp with about 20,000 Filipinos and 1,500 Americans dying there because of disease, starvation, neglect, and brutality. In June, to get out of the camp, Steele joined the Tayabas Road detail. This proved even more difficult than the March, especially since none of the soldiers knew when it would be over. For most, it would end in death. Out of the original 325 soldiers, Ben was one of only 50 who survived the work camp.

By August, Ben became so ill from beri beri, dysentery, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and malaria that he could no longer work. He was sent to Bilibid Prison for 18 months. Although expected to die, he clung to life and kept his sanity by covertly sketching Montana scenes--cowboys, horses and barns--and the human degradation and cruelty POWs were subjected to. He did so at great risk. Steele acknowledged he could have been shot if his sketches were discovered.

Canadian Inventor

On July 4, 1944,  he was put on board the freighter Canadian Inventor, which the prisoners called Mati Mati Maru. The POWs endured 62 days en route to Japan. The ship arrived at Moji, Japan on September 1. Most ships bringing POWs to Japan docked at Moji. He was sent the next day to be a slave laborer at a coal mine owned by Sanyo Muen Kogyosho, today's Ube Industries.

The POW camp linked to the mine was Hiroshima #6-B (Omine Machi). It was so close Hiroshima, that he heard the explosion of the atomic bomb dropped on that city on August 6, 1945. In 1996, to the Company's credit, they allowed a memorial to built near the mine the POWs who toiled there.

In mid-September 1945, he was evaluated to the hospital ship USS Consolation, taken to Okinawa and then was flown to San Francisco by the 19th Bombardment Group C54 and assigned to Fort George Wright Hospital in Spokane, Washington, where he remained until he was discharged on July 10, 1946. Steele painted scenes from his capture as he went through his long recovery, including trying to regain the 80 pounds he lost. “I had lots of problems to work through,” he said, “and the doctors thought the art was a good idea.”

In 1950, Ben graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Kent State University two years later and a Master of the Arts degree from Denver University in 1955. He also pursued further graduate study at the University of Oregon, Illinois State University, and Montana State University. He served as post crafts director for the Department of Army at Fort Riley, Kansas in 1953 and as staff crafts director for the 3rd U.S. Army in 1956. In September 1959, he started teaching in the art department of Eastern Montana College, today's University of Montana, Billings, acting as director and eventually as head of the art department until June 1982. He retired as Professor of Art Emeritus.

He said he learned to forgive his Japanese captors because of his relationship with Harry Koyama, an art student of Japanese heritage. “He’s been a part of my life since I met him in college in the 1960s,” Koyama, a western artist with a gallery in Billings, said about Steele. “That’s even more of a humbling experience to know that I had not just an effect, but a positive effect on his life.”

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Steele’s powerful images of his time in captivity are housed at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture at the University of Montana in Missoula. While many people knew Steele’s war stories and what he endured as a prison of war, “it’s his personality, his warm caring personality that made people love him,” his daughter says. “His students would come up to me and say, ‘Ben and I have a special bond.’ But he made everyone feel special.” Steele’s survival was chronicled in the 2009 New York Times best-seller Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael and Elizabeth Norman.

A documentary of Steele’s life, Survival Through Art, narrated by Alec Baldwin and filmed by ADBC-MS President Jan Thompson has just been completed. In March 2016, ground was broken for Ben Steele Middle School in Billings. 

Please God, set us free

Church of England Service in the courtyard of Changi Gaol

by Charles Thrale from the FEPOW Website Christmas Wishes

Merry Christmas, memories of imprisonment linger

Ronald Searle was one of Great Britain's most famous illustrators and cartoonists. His work graced many a cover of the New Yorker. An architectural draftsman for the British Army, Searle was captured by the invading Japanese in Singapore March 1942. For the next three years until September 1945 he endured the horrors of the Changi prison camp and then the building of Thai Burma Death Railroad. Throughout, he continued draw even switching to his right hand when his dominant left hand was covered in ulcers. Above is a Christmas card he sent to a fellow former POW. The tower is the one in Changi. To the Kwai and Back is a collection of Searle's war drawings.

Merry Christmas Past - 1942

By Des Bettany. Reproduced with kind permission of his family.
To see more images, refer to http://www.changipowart.com/

Food was the stuff of dreams for a POW of Japan. Starvation was a Japanese strategy of both intent and error to subdue their Western captives. British Lance Bombardier Bettany captured in Malaya after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and imprisoned at the infamous Changi used a purloined brush and pen to help transcend the POWs despair to hope.

In contrast to much of the Western POW art which survives from this period, Bettany’s finds uplifting humor in the day-to-day existence of the POW. Much of his POW work is one of light-heartedness, helping keep a sense of optimism in the face of a brutal captor.

Bettany's survival as a POW of Japan was in no small part due to his not being sent to work on the notorious Thai-Burma Death Railway, which claimed the lives of some 16,000 allied POWs and a much greater number of forced labor Asian workers. Des was repatriated to England late September 1945

Other well-know artists of the POW of Japan experience are Ben Steele (United States), Murray Griffin (Australia), Jack Chalker (Australia) and Ronald Searle (United Kingdom).

More on painting the horror.

Jungle Journal

A Jungle Journal page

Jungle Journal: Prisoners of the Japanese in Java 1942-1945 is a true account of the alternate horror and banality of daily life, and the humor that helped British POWs of Japan on Java survive the beatings, deprivation, and death of comrades.

Told through the diary and papers of Lt Ronald Williams, an officer in the 77th Heavy Anti Aircraft Royal Artillery and others, Jungle Journal includes many cartoons and poems produced by the prisoners, as well as extracts from the original Jungle Journal, a newspaper created in the first months of captivity by the men under the noses of their guards.

Williams was the "editor" of this potentially fatal "publication" produced at the Tanjong Priok POW Camp just north of Batavia (Jakarta). Over 6,000 POWs of all nationalities were kept there. Americans were survivors from the USS Houston and the Texas Lost Battalion.

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At the end of the war Williams kept as many of the newspapers as he could and stored the collection in a trunk in the attic of his home in Powys, Mid Wales.

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The first issue carried the message:

If this production can make one gunner forget for five minutes the disappointments and discomforts of his present position, then our editorial efforts will not be in vain.

The book was compiled and edited by Williams' son, Frank, and published in June. In an interview with The Daily Mail, Frank Williams observed "You can see hatred all the way through. They detested their captors but the men kept a level of humanity which I think is incredible really."

The Imperial War Museum has a good collection of artifacts, diaries, and oral histories from Commonwealth POWs held on Java. The BBC's "People's War" features a number of oral histories from POWs on Java. See Tommy Scott who was in the same regiment as Lt. Williams.

Death March remembered

At the Cannes Film Festival this year, a film on the infamous 1942 Bataan Death March was featured among "un certain regard" selections. As you can see from the clip above, the Filipino director, Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr., took a very stylistic, emotive approach to the war crime.

He was not concerned with historic details such as the style of the helmets or cleanliness of the uniforms. He wanted the viewer to feel the brutality, to sense the hopelessness, to become abandoned of all senses. The film is considered "experimental."

Unfortunately, Alix overplayed his objective and the film was not well-received. The Variety reviewer wrote that the film, Death March, was a

gruelingly abstract and attenuated war meditation. Deploying a curious mix of artificial scenery, extended slow-motion and black-and-white cinematography, the director seeks to suspend viewers in the surreal, barbaric experience of the Bataan Death March, which claimed the lives of thousands of POWs being forcibly transferred by the Japanese army in 1942. That it’s monotonous and excruciating by design isn’t enough to recommend this drawn-out tribute/art piece, whose walkout-heavy Cannes premiere doesn’t bode well for its prospects beyond festivals.

In contrast, filmaker Jan Thompson's Tragedy of Bataan, tries to maintain historical accuracy and stays close to traditional documentary filmmaking.

The Tragedy of Bataan features first-person accounts by over 20 survivors of the conflict, archival photos, and never-before-seen Japanese propaganda film footage. It also includes excerpts from the unpublished diary of Captain Albert Brown of Pinckneyville, Illinois, who describes the five months leading up to the surrender of U.S. troops and Filipino defenders to the Imperial Japanese Army. Brown, who is featured in the television program, was 101 years old at the time of the interview and passed away at age 105 in August 2011. He had been the oldest survivor of the Bataan Death March.

These are two different films, albeit with an important history to recall. Neither, however, transcends to art. They are not graphically arresting, unsettling records of the horror. Whereas the story they tell is memorable, the storytelling is not. They are not Night and Fog, The Sorrow and The Pity, Schindler's List or Sophie's Choice, the title of which has become an literary expression for an unbearable choice.

But these films about the March are important steps toward encouraging the production of a seminal film on the POW experience. And most important, they are proof that the history will not expire with the death of the last survivor. The story is moving into the realm of the artist. The arts embed history into culture and are thus the best way to ensure permanence. In the end, Japan's deniers have more to fear from art than they do from history.

Auction of POW art

Working Party with typed label to verso inscribed Working Party. Bullock cart loaded with rocks and one Japanese (nicknamed Angel Face) had to be pulled three miles by five sick POWs over rocky muddy ground, slight crease marks, small tears, small holes, cellotape residue to one side

Trail of Death bearing typed label to verso inscribed Trail of Death. "Those who went before...", crease marks and associated loss, some small tears.

As reported by the Cambridge News, on Tuesday, May 21, 2012, the British auction house Rowleys will put up for sale four drawings by LEO RAWLINGS (1918-1984) a member of the 2nd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Malaya tasked with defending Singapore.

Rawlings was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Signapore in 1942 and he eventually ended up working, along with many others thousands of POWS, on the construction of the notorious Thai-Burma Death Railway. He secretly recorded the experience in a series of drawings and ink washes.

Christmas on the Thai-Burma Death Railway 1943

Christmas Eve, 1943. Carol Singing, Dysentery Ward. 
Ching_Kai POW Camp, Thai-Burma Railway.


Watercolour on board.
 Copyright Status: artist estate

The above watercolor of POWs singing Christmas carols is by John George Mennie who joined Britain's Royal Artillery in 1940 and was posted in September 1941 to Singapore. He was captured when Singapore surrendered to the Japanese forces in February 1942 and was a prisoner of war untill August 1945. He was held at Changi Singapore 1942, Kanu 1943; Chungtai and Tamawau 1944, and Pratchi Thailand 1945. He was a slave laborer working on the Thail-Burma Death Railway.

Over fifty pieces of his POW work are archived in the Imperial War Museum in London. Recently, a collection of his work surfaced in the shoebox of a friend and former POW. These were featured on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow.