Ambassador Mondale's Cousin Jimmy

Mondale loved cigars

The passing of Walter Mondale (1928-2021) this week highlights another POW story. His first cousin James “Jimmy” Cowan died in the Philippines as a prisoner of Imperial Japan. Despite this family connection, the former U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1993-1996), Vice President (1977-81), and U.S. Senator from Minnesota (1964-1916) did very little to assist or defend the American POWs of Japan.

By all accounts, even from the Vice President, Jimmy had a tough life with little help from his aunts and uncles. He lost both parents at an early age. His mother, Claribel Hope Mondale, a sister of Mondale's father died in childbirth when Jimmy was nine. After that he never lived in any one place for long, bouncing from relatives' homes or working as a farm hand.

At 21 in January 1941, Jimmy joined the Army. He was soon on his way to the Philippines, part of the rush to build up troops. He was assigned to the U.S. Army 60th Coast Artillery Corps helping man anti-aircraft guns on Corregidor with Battery F “Flint.”  His commanding officer was Major Robert Douglass Glassburn, West Point ’32, who survived the sinking of Oryoku Maru and Enoura Maru, only to die upon arrival in Japan via the Brazil Maru on January 30, 1945 from malnutrition, exposure, and an infected leg wound.

Jimmy became a prisoner of Japan when the fortress Island fell on May 6, 1942. It can be assumed that he was herded with the 12,000 other POWs to the open-air, rocky beach of the 92nd Garage Area. For two weeks, exposed to the sun with limited water and provisions, he was held at this filthy, sinking few acres. It is possible he was given clean up duties or other tasks assigned by his capturers. 

On May 25, the survivors were ferried to Manila, made to wade ashore, and forced on the “March of Shame” five miles down Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison. Over the next few days the men were loaded into train stock cars for transport to the Cabanatuan POW camp north of Manila. There they joined the survivors of Camp O’Donnell, many of whom endured the Bataan Death March. It is also unknown what assignments or illnesses he had during this period of his captivity.

In mid-December 1944, the Japanese rounded up all ambulatory POWs in the Philippines for transport to Japan. Some researchers believe that this was in preparation to locate all the POWs together in Japan or China to use as hostages in peace negotiations. More than 1,600 men were loaded in the hold of the passenger ship the Oryoku Maru in Manila on December 13, 1945.

By the time the ship got underway and made the 60-some miles up to Subic Bay at least 50 POWs died packed shoulder to shoulder in the dark, sweltering containers. On December 14 and 15, American planes from the USS Hornet and USS Cabot attacked and sank the ship. The first bombs destroyed the forward hold killing 200 men. Among them was Pvt Cowan.

Jimmy’s body rests with the sea. His name is inscribed on the Tablets of the Missing at the American Cemetery in Manila. If he had survived the attack, he would have had to endure a week on a barren, sun exposed tennis court before being put aboard the Enoura Maru or Brazil Maru to Formosa (Taiwan). If he was aboard the Enoura Maru, the same group of planes from the USS Hornet would have bombed the ship while in port. Four hundred men died from that attack. 

The survivors were consolidated on board the Brazil Maru for the trip north to Japan’s frigid port of Moji. Of the 1,619 POWs who had boarded the Oryoku Maru in Manila, the Philippines, less than 600 survived to arrive in Moji, Japan on January 30, 1945. Of those, nearly 200 died in Japanese POW camps in Japan, Korea, and China, with most dying in the first few days at Moji. Only 403 men of the original 1,619 survived to be liberated in August 1945.

I became involved in Pvt Cowan’s story upon reading about the discovery on Corregidor, and subsequent return, of his dogtags to his sister in 2013. The story noted that their mother was former Ambassador Mondale’s aunt. This connection to a soldier on Corregidor was something no one had ever mentioned.

This was of personal interest, because in the spring of 1974, I was one of the first two female Exeter-Andover Washington interns (I was among the first classes of girls to attend Exeter). I was assigned to Mondale’s Senate office. Subsequently, I interned or worked for him while he was vice president and at his pre-presidential campaign law/consulting firm. 

Thus, at a meeting in Washington, I approached him and asked him about his cousin. At first startled that someone knew this connection, he said yes that Jimmy was his cousin who he believed had died on the Death March. Most people think if someone fought in the Philippines they were on the Death March, which is generally not true. 

I said Jimmy was not on the March and offered to put together some basic facts about his cousin. He was a bit hesitant, but agreed. Mr. Mondale, I discovered, had a very fraught relationship with his family. The Depression took a toll on family ties and he was estranged from his brothers. 

In 2018, the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society was planning a memorial ceremony and booklet for the placement of a memorial stone in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii to the men who perished on the Enoura Maru. It occurred to me that Mondale might see the booklet as a way to finally and properly remember his cousin.

Thus, I approached him again asking if he wanted a memorial page to Jimmy and offered to write it for his approval. It was not an easy yes for Mondale. He never asked if he could make a donation and hesitated to even review the draft. Nonetheless, he approved the draft shortly before the booklet was to go to press. It is significant that he did.

As Ambassador to Japan and afterward, Mr. Mondale was a keen and well-rewarded advocate for Japan. At two critical junctures he failed his cousin and undermined progress toward justice for the POWs of Japan. In 1995, when the Japanese government under Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama was putting together the Peace Friendship and Exchange Initiative, the U.S. State Department and Embassy in Tokyo, under his watch,  did nothing to advocate for American POWs to be included in this extensive, multi-million dollar outreach program for Allied POWs. Thus, they were noticeably excluded.

The American POWs were not offered any program until they, themselves, advocated with the Japanese Embassy and the Obama Administration. Trips to Japan for former POWs did not begin until 2010. The result was that only a handful of POWs who survived to their 90s could benefit from Japan’s conciliatory effort. Some of the good feeling generated by the trips was undone by Abe’s April 29, 2015 [Hirohito’s birthday] speech to a joint meeting of Congress where he thanked the POWs for their “tolerance.”

In 2001, a group of American POWs of Japan were suing in the courts and advocating in Congress for a right to sue the 60-some Japanese corporations that benefited from their slave labor. Mondale worked closely with the Bush Administration and the Japanese Embassy to tell legislators and opinion leaders that allowing compensation for the POWs would abrogate the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and undermine the entire U.S. treaty system. 

Although the Dutch and others had long abrogated the treaty with their own side deals; and the issue of corporate compensation could easily be argued, especially after the 2000 Berlin Accords establishing payments to those who were slave laborers for German companies, the White House and the Japanese prevailed. On September 25, 2001, Mondale and former ambassadors to Japan Thomas S. Foley and Michael H. Armacost issued an op ed in the Washington Post, “Pacific Deal” mirroring a letter circulating in Congress by former Secretary of State George Shultz opposing legislation that would permit POW suits against Japan. The essay repeated Shultz, “I have always supported the best of treatment for our veterans, especially those who were involved in combat. If they are not being adequately taken care of, we should always be ready to do more -- but let us not unravel confidence in the commitment of the United States to a treaty properly negotiated and solemnly ratified with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate.” 

The campaign against the POWs was successful. Senator Daniel Inouye and his friend Senator Ted Stevens engineered killing in a November 8, 2001, 4:00 am conference meeting an amendment to the Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and related agencies Appropriations Act, 2002, that would have prevented the Departments of State and the Justice from opposing POW lawsuits. And the Bush State Department filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, the young lawyer and Rhodes Scholar who composed the brief, was even awarded the Department of State’s “Superior Honor Award” in recognition of successful representation of the United States in numerous appeals involving World War II-era claims (2003). 

One of the first things I learned in Senator Mondale’s office was when I was tasked to escort the Senator to a meeting. I was panicked as he seemed to refuse to gather himself to get to the meeting on time. When I worried he was going to be late, he put down his cigar and told the teenage me flatly, that “the important people are always late.”

Yes, Mondale was late to remember his cousin who died in service to his country. But, in the end, he did. Whereas the Japanese have escaped responsibility, he eventually embraced it.

Never Forgotten - November 2 Funeral for USCG LT Crotty

LT Thomas James Eugene "Jimmy" Crotty was the only member of the US Coast Guard to become a POW of Japan. His combat record garnered the Coast Guard a battle streamer for the Philippines Campaign. He will "return" home on November 1, 2019. Semper Paratus

Arlington Cemetery Memorial

His remains were recently identified after being exhumed from Common Grave 312 in the American Cemetery and Memorial in Manila in the Philippines.

There are many opportunities during LT Crotty's return home from Hawaii to Buffalo, New York to honor him. Please take a moment to sign his "tribute wall" LINK HERE

On Thursday October 31, the repatriation ceremony for LT Crotty at Coast Guard will be held at Air Station Barbers Point, Kapolei, Hawaii at 11:00am. During the repatriation ceremony, a Coast Guard Honor Platoon led by Rear Adm. Kevin Lunday, commander, Coast Guard 14th District, will escort Crotty’s remains from the hearse to a HC-130 Hercules airplane and accompany the remains to Coast Guard Air Station Sacramento. There the casket will be transferred to another plane to continue its journey home.

On Friday, November 1, his arrival honors will be held at Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station, 10405 Lockport Rd., New York at 10:00am. 

All are invited to join LT Crotty's family on Saturday, November 2nd at Noon for a funeral Mass for LT Crotty at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Buffalo, New York. He will be buried with full military honors next to his parents in Holy Cross Cemetery, 2900 South Park Avenue, Lackawanna, Erie County, New York. Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Karl L. Schultz is expected to attend as are senior officials from the Navy and Marines. 

The family will also receive LT Crotty's Filipino Veterans of WWII Congressional Gold Medal during the ceremony. It symbolizes Congressional recognition of the enduring bond between the American and Filipino forces defending the Philippines against Imperial Japan's invasion.

A 1934 Coast Guard Academy graduate, Crotty was assigned mid-1941 to the US Navy Mine Recovery Unit at Cavite Navy Yard near Manila in the Philippines. He served aboard the USS Quail in the Philippines during the outbreak of World War II in early 1942 and in April aided the 4th Marines in the defense of Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay. He missed the epic escape of the USS Quail's captain and 17 crew members in a 36-ft motor launch across the Pacific to Australia. Instead, with the surrender of Corregidor on May 6, 1942, he found himself on the rocky beach of Corregidor's 92nd Garage Area. At the end of the month he and most of the POWs on Corregidor were taken to Manila and marched down Dewey Blvd to Bilibid Prison. From there they were put standing in trains to the Cabanatuan POW Camp. He died there on July 21, 1942 of diphtheria. See HERE for more of his story on this blog and HERE for the official Coast Guard biography.

Coast Guard Mutual Assistance (CGMA) has established an award in LT Crotty's name. The Lieutenant Thomas James Crotty Inspirational Leadership Award recognizes the CGMA Representative who best exemplifies a willingness to go above and beyond in the service of the Coast Guard family. Donations in lieu of flowers to support this award may be made to Coast Guard Mutual Assistance online or sent to 1005 North Glebe Road, Suite 200, Arlington VA 22201. Please note LT Crotty on the donation.

News story from The Buffalo News, October 27, 2019.

THE Coast Guard's POW of Japan

Lt James Crotty, USCG

August 4th is the birthday of the U.S. Coast Guard. On this day in 1790, the first Congress authorized the construction of 10 vessels to enforce tariff and trade laws, prevent smuggling, and protect the collection of federal revenue.

Thus, today, we pause to remember the Coast Guard's one POW of Japan. Records suggest there were two others, but Coast Guard historians believe they were actually sailors assigned to Coast Guard duties in the Philippines.

By all accounts, Lt. Thomas James "Jimmy" Crotty is a hero. He arrived in the Philippines on October 28, 1941 for what was supposed to be a six month deployment as a member of a Navy mine recovery unit near Manila.

A 1934 Coast Guard Academy graduate, Crotty had never before traveled outside North America. He served on board cutters based out of New York, Seattle, Alaska and Sault Ste. Marie. His career included duty on the cutter USCGC Tampa (WMEC-902) during its famous rescue of passengers from the burning liner SS Morro Castle, and a Justice Department appointment as special deputy on the Bering Sea Patrol.

Prior to his Philippines assignment he studied at the Navy’s Mine Warfare School in Yorktown, Virginia. With additional training at the Navy’s Mine Recovery Unit in Washington, DC, Lt. Crotty became the Coast Guard’s leading expert in mine operations, demolition and the use of explosives. He was first assigned to the In-Shore Patrol Headquarters at the American Navy yard at Cavite, located near Manila.

On December 10, Japanese aircraft bombed and damaged most of the facilities at the Cavite Navy Yard and advancing enemy ground forces necessitated the movement of American units behind fortified lines on the Bataan Peninsula and onto the island fortress of Corregidor. During this evacuation, Crotty supervised the demolition of strategic civilian and military facilities to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. This equipment and material included the Navy yard’s ammunition magazine and the fleet submarine USS Sea Lion, which the enemy damaged during the air attack. Crotty had the sub stripped of useful parts, filled it with depth charges and blew it up on Christmas Day.

Corregidor under attack

The Navy withdrew Crotty and its other personnel from Cavite to the Sixteenth Naval District Headquarters at Fort Mills, on Corregidor. The Navy reassigned Crotty to the local guard unit, but he also participated in night raids on the mainland to demolish more American equipment and facilities before the Japanese occupied Manila.

During February and March of 1942, Crotty served as executive officer of the Navy minesweeper USS Quail (AM-15), which shot down enemy aircraft and swept American mine fields so U.S. submarines could surface at night to deliver goods and remove critical personnel. During his time as executive officer, the Quail served as a command vessel and provided shore bombardment for an offensive against Japanese landings attempting to cut off supply lines to American forces trapped on the Bataan Peninsula.

click to order

After Bataan was surrendered on April 9, 1942, Corregidor's defenders held out for another month. Crews on board Navy vessels, such as Quail, had cannibalized deck guns and moved them onto the island to mount a final stand against the encircling enemy forces. Crotty served up to the bitter end fighting alongside the island’s stubborn Army, Navy and Marine defenders. Eye witnesses reported last seeing him commanding a force of Marines and Army personnel manning 75-millimeter beach guns firing down on enemy forces landing on Corregidor’s beaches. When Japanese bombardment finally silenced Crotty’s guns, Corregidor’s defenders knew the island fortress would soon fall.

The Quail was scuttled May 5th to prevent her capture. After, Lt. Commander John H. Morrill gave his crew the choice of surrendering to the Japanese or striking out across open ocean the Quail's 36-foot diesel motor launch. Only 17 of his 24-member crew could join him on the desperate voyage. Lt. Crotty had been separated from the crew, as mentioned above, to command a mixed defensive unit on Corregidor and was not included. With a pistol recovered from a dead serviceman as their only armament (this may not be true), supplies and weapons scavenged from the beached tugboat Ranger on Caballo Island, and with a few charts and navigational aids from the Ranger, Morrill and his crew evaded the Japanese and transversed 2,060 miles of ocean, reaching Darwin, Australia on June 6 after 31 days.  See Morrill's account in his book: SOUTH FROM CORREGIDOR

motor launch to Darwin

With Corregidor’s capitulation on May 6, Crotty became the first Coast Guard prisoner of war since the War of 1812, when the British captured Revenue Cutter Service cuttermen. At the end of May, the Japanese loaded Crotty and his fellow prisoners into watercraft transferring POWs from Corregidor Island to Manila, where they were marched through the city to Bilibid Prison and eventually taken by railroad in box cars to the Cabanatuan prison camp in northern Luzon.

Crotty’s fellow prisoners at Cabanatuan knew him for his love of sports as well as his sense of humor and optimism. One of them wagered a bet with Crotty on the outcome of the 1942 World Series while another later recounted that: “The one striking thing that I remember was his continued optimism and cheerfulness under the most adverse circumstances. He was outstanding in this respect at a time when such an attitude was so necessary for general welfare.” But Crotty’s courage and optimism could not sustain him late in the summer of 1942 when a diphtheria epidemic swept through the camp killing forty prisoners per day. Crotty contracted the illness and, with the Camp's lack of necessary medications and proper health care, he passed away only days after getting sick joining the more than 2,500 American POWs who perished in this camp during the war.

It had been unclear if he died July 19th or September 30th. On September 10, 2019, the Defense Personnel Accounting Agency (DPAA) confirmed that Crotty had died July 19, 1942, and was buried along with fellow prisoners in the Cabanatuan Camp Cemetery, in grave number 312. In January 2018, the “unknown” remains associated with Common Grave 312 were disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory for analysis, including one set, designated X-2858 Manila #2. These remains proved to be LT. Crotty's.

In a May 6, 2010 ceremony in Buffalo, New York, Crotty's descendants received his long-overdue Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the Prisoner of War Medal and the Philippines Defense Medal. It is possible for the family to now apply for the Congressional Gold Medal given to those who served with Filipino troops during WWII.

On November 2, 2019, a rosette will be placed beside his name on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial indicating that he has been found. His funeral will be that day in Buffalo, New York at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church  and he will be buried with full military honors next to his parents in Holy Cross Cemetery, 2900 South Park Avenue, Lackawanna, Erie County, New York.

One of the 43 Battle Streamers on the Coast Guard flag--Philippines Defense--is entirely due to the actions of one man, LT Crotty from Buffalo, New York, who helped command a Navy vessel, scuttled a submarine, swept mines, served as adjutant, led Marines and soldiers defending Corregidor and held the line to the last.

Requiescat In Pace

Liberally borrowed from Compass and War History Online.
Updated October 20 and 21, 2019

Corregidor, MacArthur, and the Japan’s New Emperor

This article first appeared in Medium on May 6, 2019.

Staged picture of the Surrender of Corregidor

The 77th Anniversary of the day Corregidor fell was May 6, 1942. It is a history that shadows every Japanese Golden Week and especially last week’s imperial succession ceremonies.

From December 29, 1941 to the end of April 1942, despite incessant Japanese aerial, naval, and artillery bombardment, the men and women on the fortress Island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, which consisted of the 4th Marine Regiment and combined units from the United States Army, the US Navy, and Filipino soldiers, resisted valiantly, inflicting heavy enemy losses in men, ships, and aircraft.

The last week on Corregidor was brutal. The Japanese celebrated Emperor Hirohito’s April 29th birthday by intensifying their shelling. By week’s end, the island’s infrastructure was destroyed, bombing incessant, water scarce, and the invasion begun. The siege of Corregidor had succeeded.

Fearful of a complete annihilation of the more than 12,000 Americans and Filipinos on Corregidor and the three nearby island forts, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all on May 6, 1942. The rest of the Philippines were surrendered over the next month after the Japanese threatened to massacre all the POWs and civilians on Corregidor.

Seventy-seven years later, the 1942 fall of Corregidor still matters. It set the timetable for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan General Douglas MacArthur’s punishment of Japan’s militarists. And thus, it set the Abe Government’s timetable the abdication for Emperor Hirohito’s son, Emperor Akihito, on April 30, 2019 and the ascension of his son, Naruhito, to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, 2019. Abe wanted to expunge an ugly history that MacArthur wanted to embed.

As noted, April 29th was Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. It was a sacred day in wartime Japan. General MacArthur ended that practice and humanized the Emperor. After the War, this date became a holiday to appreciate nature called Greenery Day. In 2007, soon after anti-Japanese riots in China, Greenery Day was replaced by Showa Day to again remember Emperor Hirohito and his reign called Showa. Greenery Day is now held on May 4.

It was no coincidence that General MacArthur chose the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to begin and the indictments for Tojo and other war criminals to be read on April 29, 1946. MacArthur, commander of all US Army Forces in the Far East, forced to escape Corregidor, remembered bitterly his abandonment of his troops and the fall of Corregidor. MacArthur wanted the Japanese also to feel his loss and to forever associate Hirohito with war crimes. In turn, the Tribunal proceedings began on May 3, which in 1947 the new Japanese Constitution came into effect.

It was also the same thinking that led MacArthur to have General Hideki Tojo and six other Class-A war criminals hanged on December 23, 1948. This day is now-former Emperor Akihito’s birthday and long celebrated as the national day for Japan with Embassy parties worldwide. Akihito, however, is forever reminded of the date’s other history.

MacArthur did not want the Japanese to ever forget what they suffered from their loyalty to their monarchs. And he did not want the emperors to forget the consequences and responsibilities of this power. MacArthur wanted to translate the reverence the Japanese had for their emperors into a deep respect for peace.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has different goals. By sandwiching the Imperial abdication and ascension in between the important dates of April 29 and May 3, Prime Minister Abe hopes to diminish if not erase their historical significance. This is what he means when he declares that he wants to “end Japan’s postwar regime. Abe believes he must and can free Japan from these embedded reminders of the war and all that it wrought. The Prime Minister believes the Japanese people should remember the war years as a happier, simpler, and prouder time.

Yet, in his hubris and revisionist history, Abe misses that MacArthur is still setting down the markers and forcing the timetable in Japan. By maneuvering around MacArthur’s touchstones, Abe simply emphasizes them. They are now the brackets sanctioning imperial succession and the rule of law.

MacArthur’s war history will again loom large over the October 22nd formal coronation of Emperor Naruhito. October 20th, will be the 75th Anniversary of MacArthur’s promised return to the Philippines and the beginning of its liberation from Japanese rule. The last, largest and finally decisive naval battle between the US Fleets in the Pacific and the Japanese Combined Fleet was fought in the Philippines’ Gulf of Leyte from October 23–26, 1944.

Emperor Naruhito, who studied history at Oxford, is likely aware of this history. His father, Emperor Akihito, held his coronation on November 12, 1990, 42 years to the day that General Tojo was sentenced to death. Naruhito’s challenge is to be true to the MacArthur’s lessons and to administering the peace, which is the literal, albeit not official Abe government, translation of the Reiwa Era.

Hawaii marker to honor hundreds of WWII prisoners of war

LuDan Crowley

POW recounts the inhumanity of Imperial Japan

By WYATT OLSON
STARS AND STRIPES, August 16, 2018

Daniel Crowley often repeats two words as he recounts his experience as a prisoner of war being shipped from the Philippines to Japan in 1944: nightmare and lucky.

“The hellships were nightmarish,” said the 96-year-old. As the Allies prepared to retake the Philippines after more than three years of Japanese occupation, POWs were marched to ports to be shipped to the Japanese mainland. Hundreds of men would be crammed together in the deepest bowels of the ships in sweltering heat and little or no ventilation.

“They would prod you in the ass with their bayonets and force you down into the deepest ‘dragoons’ until they packed human beings so tightly that you couldn’t turn around, sit down, lie down,” Crowley said. “You just sat in the [feces]. It’s beyond your worst nightmare.”

The guards’ “idea of a humane gesture,” he said, was to let a few men each day carry buckets of feces and urine to the top deck and dump it over the side of the Taikoku Maru. “And throw dead bodies over the side,” he said. “They definitely allowed that every day.”

“But actually, I was lucky,” Crowley said, noting that the ship made it to Japan intact in a relatively fast 17 days. Other hellships took many more weeks and were frequently targets of Allied submarines and carrier aircraft because they were not marked as carrying POWs.
Death march

For Crowley and all the other American POWs in the Philippines, the hellships were just one scene from a three-year tribulation steeped in death, deprivation and depravity.

The youngest of six brothers, Crowley was stationed in the Philippines in the spring of 1941 as a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps and worked on servicing aircraft.

With the outbreak of war with Japan that December, he and everyone else in uniform “all turned into infantry grunts,” defending the island with mostly World War I-era weapons.

Four months later, about 78,000 American and Filipino troops made a final stand with their backs against the sea at the tip of Bataan Peninsula. Crowley was among them.

On April 9, 1942, Maj. Gen. Edward King Jr., surrendered those troops, and they were led away on the infamous and deadly Bataan Death March.

Crowley, however, jumped into the sea at night and swam to Corregidor Island, about three miles off the tip of Bataan, which was still held by the U.S. Marines. He fought there until May 6, when Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered. The POWs were marched through the streets of Manila escorted by young Japanese officers on horseback with drawn swords, Crowley said.

At the end of the march, they were loaded into railroad boxcars, where they were crammed together standing for what was about an eight-hour trip.

“Most everyone was suffering from diarrhea,” he said. “Between the urine and the [feces], we were wallowing in it. The floor of the car became a pestilence.

“That was probably the most horrible thing and all those years of incarceration — wallowing in the human waste,” he said.

‘Known mess’

Crowley ended up in a POW camp near the city of Cabanatuan, about 70 miles north of Manila.

“The death rate got to be astronomical,” he said. “Those who were dying were thrown under the barracks to lie in the dirt. That was called the ‘zero ward,’ meaning you weren’t going to come out of there alive.”

With the “known mess” he was in, Crowley said he jumped at the chance to join a work detail that was sent to the southern Philippine island of Palawan, where he spent a year and a half building a runway from jungle using nothing but axes, picks and shovels.

They survived on what was roughly 600 calories a day in the form of rice soup.

“The body stabilizes after a while, and all those who are going to die quickly, die quickly,” he said. “So the death rate was at horrendous levels in the first two months. After about six months, weak from the lack of nutrition and water under the brutal slave labor, you were a living skeleton.

“If you didn’t jump and work your ass off when you were ordered to, they’d just beat you to death if they wanted to. At the very least they’d beat you to pulp.”

“My beard was down to my waist,” he said. “My hair was hanging over my shoulders. My skin was burned black from the sun.”

He feigned insanity, and with the appearance to match it, the work camp’s doctor eventually deemed him “unfit for labor,” Crowley said with a laugh.

Others found a more painful way out of hard labor. He recalled that a guy from Long Island would use a metal bar to break the arms of the willing.

“These fellows would put their arm down on the stump, and he’d shatter it with his metal bar,” he said. “That was 10 cigarettes he charged.”

‘American slaves’

In March 1944, Crowley was shipped to the Japanese mainland where he worked in two separate copper mines, the last one 2,000 feet below the surface.

“We were slaves at the Furukawa copper mine,” he said, recalling the sadistic pleasure the controller of the cable and winch seemed to get in letting the bucket filled with men freefall for 1,900 feet before it careened to a stop.

He recalled walking through waist-deep snow to the wooden hut they were housed in outside the mine.

“They would give us two or three fist-sized clumps of charcoal to heat the whole wooden structure where hundreds of slaves were packed in — American slaves,” he said.

How did Crowley cope with such conditions for long without losing hope?

“I simply believe I was blessed by a strong father with the strong mind who imparted some of his genes to me so that I could make it,” he said. “I just pretended it was normal to get in that bucket with about 20, 25 other people and drop at an alarming rate for brutal slave labor. Every day was a new milestone. It actually got to the point where it was the normal way to live.”

But he also fixated on fantasies of vengeance, with thoughts of making the “sons of bitches pay if I could someday,” he said.

Crowley has had a good life since he was liberated, married 65 years to his first wife with whom he had two children. Living in Connecticut, he remarried recently, and his wife, Kelley, 42 years younger than him, admits that she has a hard time keeping up with him. He laughs often and jokes frequently.

But he will not make peace with his old enemy.

“I couldn’t forgive,” he said. “How could I forgive?"

POW Families speak in Japan

On December 7, 2016, the Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University's Japan Campus in Japan hosted its 6th dialogue with former POWs. This time, no POWs were able to participate. Instead, widows and children traveled to Japan to see where their loved ones were slave laborers.

There is an assumption that reconciliation has been achieved and that it is a distinct end point. None of this is true. Reconciliation is a process and a journey. The trip, decades too late and hard fought for, is merely a beginning. Speaking in public of their painful family history was very difficult for these women.

The introduction of the panel members was abysmal. Here you can find a link to fuller, researched profiles of the POWs discussed.

Eighth POW delegation to Japan this week

Widows and Children of POWs of Japan

 Undertake trip of reconciliation

Pearl Harbor Week

Nine widows and children of American former prisoners of war of Imperial Japan are visiting Japan this week as guests of the Japanese government. They are the 8th delegation of the U.S.-Japan POW Friendship Program to promote reconciliation between the two countries. This successful program began in 2010.

The families represent five American POWs of Japan who were members of the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps, U.S. Army Quartermasters Corps, 4th Marines, and U.S. Army Air Corps. Japan attacked the Philippines and other American Pacific outposts hours after their surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor. All the men fought on Corregidor in the Philippines to defend the then-American colony against invading Japanese forces. They were surrendered in May 1942 after a five-month battle and all endured over three years of brutal captivity.

The delegation is composed of:

ROSE HENDERSON BRIDGES, 87, of Spartanburg, South Carolina and her daughter Mona Woodring. Mrs. Bridges is the widow of Talmadge Scott Bridges who served on Fort Hughes and Corregidor in the Philippines with the U.S. Army 59th Coast Artillery Corps (CAC). His last POW camp, Osaka #5-B Tsuruga POW Camp, was near the Tsuruga Port on the Sea of Japan were he was a stevedore for Tsuruga Transportation Company (today’s Tsuruga Kairiku Unyu K.K.).

KRISTIN DAHLSTROM, 78, of Des Plains, Illinois. She is the daughter of William Jesse Ellis, Jr. a civilian volunteer to the U.S. Army. Quartermaster Corps. He survived the infamous December 1944 “Hell ship” Oryoku Maru voyage to Japan only to die February 1945 in Japan at Fukuoka #3 Yahata/Tobata/Kokura POW Camp (Nippon Steel, today’s Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal).

DORIS ELLIS DeVIVO, 90, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and her granddaughter, Mackenzie Schnitker. Mrs. DeVivo is the widow of Frank DeVivo who served on Corregidor in the Philippines with the U.S. Army 59th Coast Artillery Corps (CAC). He was liberated in northern Japan at Sendai #8B Kosaka POW Camp associated with copper mine and smelter owned by Fujita-gumi Construction Company (today’s Dowa Holdings Co., Ltd.).

RUTH NICHOLS WILBER SHEAVES, 89, of Colorado Springs, Colorado and her daughter, Linda Van Skike. Mrs. Sheaves is the widow of Charles “Ted” Owen Wilber who served with the U.S. Army Air Corps 19th Bomb Group at Clark Field on the Philippines. Mr. Wilber was liberated from the Tokyo 2B Kawasaki aka Mitsui Camp #2 POW camp know as the “Mitsui Madhouse.”

PATRICIA THOMPSON, 84, of Colorado Springs, Colorado and her daughter, Maureen Cole. Mrs. Thompson is the widow of Clarence A. Thompson who fought on Corregidor with the 4th Marines, the China Marines. He was liberated from Fukuoka-7B-Futase POW camp in southern Japan where he mined coal for Nittetsu-Futase Tanko Kaisha (today’s Nittetsu Mining Co., Ltd.).

Full profiles of the POWs represented can be found HERE.

They will visit the sites of their loved ones’ imprisonment and rescue as well as several Japanese cultural properties.

This is the 8th trip of this much appreciated Japanese government-funded program of remembrance and reconciliation. Jan Thompson, president of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society that works with the U.S. State Department to identify participants, welcomes the inclusion of POW widows and children in the program.

Ms. Thompson said, “It confirms, as does Prime Minister’s Shinzo’s Abe’s upcoming visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial, Japan’s commitment to overcoming its dark history and shows a modern understanding that the traumas of past atrocities and war crimes are intergenerational. The goodwill and healing resulting from these trips is a model for more Japanese efforts to acknowledge and console its victims. The result strengthens the personal ties that undergird the U.S.-Japan Alliance.”

  

###

Veterans Day 2016

President Barack Obama welcomes Pvt Daniel Crowley 

and his bride Kelley 

to the White House for the Veterans Day breakfast

November 11, 2016

On October 7, 1940, Daniel Crowley, 18, traveled to Hartford, Connecticut to enlist with the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was hoping to “take long trip somewhere at the expense of our country.” The son of the once-famous women’s fashion icon, textile designer Timothy F. Crowley, he had experienced the depths of the Depression when his father’s business failed. In the 1930s, the senior Crowley turned his attention to painting and public speaking where he warned all who would listen of Japan’s unjust and brutal aggression against China.

Thus, Dan left for his “adventure” more aware than most 18 year olds that the world was rapidly moving toward war. At the United States Army Supply Base in Brooklyn, untrained and unarmed, he boarded on January 2, 1941 the USAT Leonard Wood that sailed through the Panama Canal to Angel Island off San Francisco. From there, he was transferred to the USAT U.S. Grant. This ship, via Hawaii and Guam, after engine failures, fires and a typhoon, arrived at Manila in the Philippines in March 1941.

Ptv Crowley was assigned to Nichols Field (today’s Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport) near Manila with the 24th Pursuit Group, V Interceptor Command, 17th Pursuit Squadron. For months, there was little do and the enlisted men at the Field remained untrained and their officers unconcerned. The 17th Pursuit Squadron had been sent overseas in October 1940 (arriving December 14, 1940) from Selfridge Field in Michigan without aircraft to fly. Until their planes arrived and were assembled in March 1941, they practiced in outdated Boeing P-26 Peashooters that then constituted the interceptor force at Nichols Field.

New planes arrived in March 1941. These were Seversky P-35s that had been held back from a sale to Sweden (18 June 1940, United States declared an embargo against exporting weapons to any nation other than the United Kingdom.). By late 1941 standards, the P-35s were obsolete. It was too lightly armed and lacked either armor around the cockpit or self-sealing fuel tanks. In addition, the instruments in these aircraft flown were marked in Swedish and calibrated in the metric system. New Curtiss P-40Es “Warhawks” did not arrive until September 1941.

The Japanese attacked Clark Field on December 8th, nine hours after Pearl Harbor. Next they struck Nichols Field along with other air bases on Luzon. Within three days, Japan controlled the air over the Philippines and completely eliminated the U.S. Far East Air Force as an effective defense of Asia.

Crowley participated in an improvised air defense of Nichols with antiquated British Lewis machine guns that were welded together to form more powerful, but still ineffective weapons. Despite their efforts, most of the aircraft and Nichols Field were destroyed. The ground crews were soon evacuated and sent to the Bataan Peninsular via boat and train. The base was abandoned on December 26th.

The surviving ground crews and airmen were made members of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry Regiment on Bataan. Although designated as Infantry, the U.S. Army refuses to this day to recognize these veterans as such and denies them their Combat Infantry badges. In every way, but name they fought like infantry soldiers. [Mr. Crowley still wants his Infantry Badge.]

On Bataan, Crowley’s unit was joined by the Philippine Scouts who were instrumental in helping them fend off three amphibious landings by the Japanese on the west coast of Bataan, known as the Battle of the Points. The Army Air Corps men on Bataan were armed with only machine guns from their aircraft or WWI Springfield M1903s (a five-round magazine fed, bolt-action service repeating rifle). Crowley had not fired this weapon until combat on Bataan.

After the Bataan Peninsula was surrendered April 9, 1942—the single largest military surrender in American history—his unit made its way down to the tip of Bataan and the town of Mariveles to surrender. Refusing to become prisoners, he and a number of men hide among rocks in the breakwater near the shore. At nightfall they made their way to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay by swimming and clinging to life boats with sailors from various ships bombed or scuttled in Manila Bay and Mariveles Harbor. 

Crowley remembers hiding in the breakwater with the crew of the USAT Yu Sang, an armaments ship carrying 1500 tons of bombs docked in Mariveles harbor. It was bombed and sank by the Japanese. They watched as the ensuring fire ignited the ordnance causing a tremendous explosion and tidal wave. He can still recall the sound of the flaming bits of the ship raining down on his doughboy “Brodie” helmet.

On Corregidor, Crowley became part of the 4th Marines Regimental Reserve (China Marines) commanded by Maj. Max Schaeffer. He fought with the Marines a dangerous and desperate shore defense until the island fell on May 6, 1942. His Company commander was the famous University of Tennessee football star Captain Austin Conner “Shifty” Shofner. The Philippines were surrendered on May 8th. 

Shofner would become famous later in the war for being one of the very few who escaped from a Japanese POW camp. On April 4, 1943, he and a small group of nine other Americans and two Filipinos escaped their labor camp in the Philippines. These men were able to make to a sympathetic Filipino village and were then rescued by an American sub that took them to Australia. Among the men was William Dyess who told his story to The Chicago Tribune on January 27, 1944, thus revealing to Americans for the first time about the horrors of the Bataan Death March. Shofner returned to combat in 1944 commanding units of the Marine Corps in the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa.

On May 25th, he and the nearly 12,000 other POWs who were interned in the 92nd Garage Area—an exposed beach with little water or food and no sanitation—on Corregidor were taken by boat to Manila and paraded through town on what became known as the “March of Shame.” By rail and foot, the POWs traveled on to Camp Cabanatuan. To escape its squalor and despair, Crowley joined 300 POWs in August to build an airstrip on Palawan Island for the Japanese Army. Starvation, beatings, and unworkable conditions prolonged the task.

He and approximately half of the men were returned to Manila in early 1944. Crowley says he feigned insanity to be relieved of the work. The remaining 150 prisoners on Palawan became victims of Tokyo’s directive to “kill all” POWs once the Americans began to take territory. On December 14, 1944, as American troops approached the Philippine Islands, the remaining POWs on Palawan were herded into an improvised air raid shelter, doused with gasoline, set afire, and machine-gunned to death. Nevertheless, a lucky 11 did escape to report on the Palawan Massacre.

Today, this airfield built by the POWs is the Philippine Air Force’s Antonio Bautista Air Base that shares its runway with the Puerto Princesa Airport. It is part of the enhanced security initiative between the Philippines and the United States to reinforce the Indo-Pacific.

At the time of the infamous massacre, Crowley was in Japan. He had been sent there on March 24, 1944 via Formosa aboard the “hell ship,” Taikoku Maru arriving April 3 like most other American and Allied POWs at the Port of Moji, on Kyushu. Three hundred men had been crowded into the ship's fetid hold that ordinarily would accommodate only 25 men. They were 11 days in the dark, lying in their own waste with little food or water. Of the 308 men loaded onto the ship, 17 died en route to Japan.

Crowley remembers that the Japanese had cameras focused on them as they, bedraggled and dazed, made their way down the ship's gangplank to the dock at Moji. We do not know what happened to the newsreels made from these films and photos. Today, there are memorials to Japanese soldiers, horses, and bananas at this historic port. No physical record exists, however, of the thousands of American and Allied POWs who first arrived to Japan at these docks.

He was first sent to the POW camp Tokyo #8B (Motoyama) administered by the Hitachi Company, one of the largest users of slave and forced labor in wartime Japan. There he was a slave laborer in its copper mine, Japan’s oldest and most dangerous. In August, he was transferred to Tochigi, Japan, near Tokyo, where he again mined copper ore. This time for Furukawa Kogyo (today’s Furukawa Company Group) at the Ashio POW Camp Tokyo 9-B until the end of the war. Working alongside Japanese miners were approximately 300 Allied and American POWs from the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dutch East Indies, Norway, Australia, and China.

The mine was closed in 1973 and today is a national historic site and tourist attraction touting the mine’s contribution to Japan’s industrialization, but without mention of the American and Allied POWs who labored there. The Furukawa Group is one of Japan's 15 largest industrial groups and was largely untouched by US Occupation policies to dismantle Japan’s industrial conglomerates.

Furukawa dates its origins back to 1875. Before and during World War II, Furukawa specialized in mining, electronics, and chemicals. Now, the predominant companies are Fuji Electric and Furukawa Electric as well as Fujitsu, FANUC, Advantest, and Yokohama Rubber. One US subsidiary is directly related to its mining operation is Furukawa Rock Drill USA Co., Ltd., in Kent, Ohio. The Furukawa Group has yet to acknowledge or apologize for its use of American and Allied POW slave labor.

The Ashio mine is best known as one of Japan’s most polluted sites with a long history of environmental destruction, citizen protest, and company denial dating back to the late-19th Century when the mine was privatized. Water and air pollution have ravaged the streams and forests of the region, with deteriorating toxic slag pools still threatening villages. Although mining operations were halted in 1971, the smelting of ores continues through the use of imports.

Crowley was liberated on September 4, 1945, after weeks of air drops of food, medicine, and clothing onto the POW camp. He was quickly flown to Manila via Okinawa. After several days at Sternberg General Hospital, an Army troop ship brought him and other POWs to San Francisco by early October where he spent his days recuperating at Letterman General Hospital and nights at the local bars mostly in his pajamas. He returned home to Connecticut close to Christmas. After spending time between Fort Dix Hospital in New Jersey and Connecticut, he was discharged at Fort Devens in Massachusetts on April 4, 1946.

He found that former POWs were quickly stigmatized as being unstable and difficult employees. This meant finding full time employment a challenge and he became a traveling salesman dependent upon commission and his wits. In 1958, he began working for Northwestern Mutual Insurance where he soon became one of their top producers and most successful agents.

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." In October 2014, Mr. Crowley returned to Japan as part of the 5th US-Japan POW Friendship program. Unfortunately, Furukawa executives refused to meet with him. He did, however, revisit the mine where he toiled. Overall, he felt the trip was a positive experience with the satisfaction of finally getting something back from the Japanese who profited from his labor.

His most recent effort to recognize those with whom he served was advocating for the Connecticut 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.

Mr. Crowley was married 65 years to Marie Boles and they had two children. On April 24, 2014, he married Kelley Thomen who accompanied him to Washington for the President’s Veterans Day Breakfast on November 11, 1916.

Mr. Crowley is a life-time member of VFW, American Legion, and DAV, as well as the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society.

Find more about Mr. Crowley at the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project.

Philippines POW #: 1-12747
Palawan POW #: 101
Ashio POW #: 3870

Sixth American POW Delegation to Japan

The following are profiles of the nine former POWs of Japan visiting Japan October 11-19, 2015 as guests of the Japanese government. They will hold an open meeting on October 14th.

All the men are in their 90s. One was captured in a hospital on Java after his U.S. Army Air Corps B-17 squadron evacuated in March 1942. Another fought on Corregidor AND the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Four are “China Marines.” Another, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, was Rev. Jerry Falwell’s treasurer and has an award named after him at Liberty University. Three were slave laborers at POW camps that were factories and mines that are now part of Japan's new UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites.

DIALOGUE WITH FORMER US PRISONERS OF WAR IN JAPAN 2015. 10/14, 6:30pm, Tokyo, Japan. Sponsor: Temple University. Speakers: Nine former US POWs - Leland Chandler, William Howard Chittenden, Carl Dyer, Arthur Gruenberg, George Hirschkamp, George Rogers, Jack Warner, Clifford Warren, Joseph Demott; Moderator: Robert Dujarric, Director, Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS), Temple University.
A VIDEO OF THIS MEETING IS AVAILABLE.

Initial Press Coverage by AP.

LELAND CHANDLER, 92, lives in Galesburg, Illinois. A farm boy from Table Grove, Illinois, he enlisted in the U.S. Army on February 4, 1941. He was 18. On April 1st , he boarded the USAT Republic at San Francisco with 2,200 other soldiers headed for Manila. Arriving on April 22nd, he was assigned to the 60th Coast Artillery at Fort Mills on Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay. There he was a member of “H” or “Harford Battery” on Herring Field, Middleside helping man 3-inch anti-aircraft guns under the command of Capt. Warren Starr. Starting on December 8th (December 7th in Hawaii), with the Japanese invasion, Corregidor was bombed four to five times a day during the six-month long siege. The Americans surrendered on May 6, 1942. Capt. Starr recorded that his “battery fired about 875 rounds of 3-inch ammunition, and obtained observed hits on 14 planes.” Like most of the 12,000 men on Corregidor, Chandler was crowded into a small open area, the 92nd Garage, to wait nearly three weeks in the tropical sun with little food or water to be sent by boat to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March" to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Within a few days they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp. On November 7, 1942, Mr. Chandler and over 1,400 American POWs were transferred to Japan via Formosa by the Hellship Nagato Maru. Initially, Mr. Chandler was a slave laborer for Yodogawa Tekkojo (today’s Yodokawa Steel Works, Ltd.) at the Osaka 3-D Yodogawa POW Camp He was a steel cutter in the steel mill working 12 to 15 hours each day on only two small bowls of rice a day. He was transferred in mid-May 1945 to Osaka 3-B Oeyama POW Camp where he toiled as a stevedore for Nippon Yakin Kogyo (today’s Nippon Yakin Kogyo Co., Ltd. or NYK) at Miyazu Harbor until the end of the war. After the Japanese guards disappeared and barrels of food descended from new B-29s, the prisoners decided to commandeer a Japanese train to Yokohama. There the POWs were deloused and fed and put on a ship to the Philippines and then back to San Francisco. The 5’11” Chandler weighed 185 pounds when captured, but only 85 pounds when liberated. He recalls “I made up my mind I was going to live, thank the good Lord,” and when “I broke my arm when a load of steel fell on it, I had another prisoner set it and I kept working. If you didn’t work you didn’t eat.” He spent seven months recuperating in hospitals before being discharged on April 7, 1946, at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. The next day he was hired by the Rock Island Arsenal and assigned to the Moline Airport (today’s Quad City International Airport) to provide fire protection for Army medical evacuations. After this service was discontinued, he joined the University of Illinois fire department. Two years later he joined the fire department at Chanute Air Force Base (decommissioned in 1993). He retired as Fire Chief from Chanute in 1974. For many years, Chandler and his wife enjoyed travel and RV camping. He likes woodworking and tinkering with projects in the shop/garage. He volunteers with the Care Committee at Church. He runs the CD player and sound system for the nursing home chapel services by his wife. He has been married to Ruth Chandler for 66 years.
POW# 389
Philippines POW# 1-10197

WILLIAM HOWARD CHITTENDEN, 95, resides in Wheaton, Illinois. Mr. Chittenden grew up in Chillicothe, Missouri. He enlisted in United States Marine Corps in1939 and started his basic training on October 30, 1939 at Twentynine Palms, San Diego. He was sent to China on May 5, 1940 aboard the USS Henderson (AP-1) with the 4th Regiment of the United States Marine Corp—also known as the China Marines—to be a guard at the U.S. Embassy in Peking (Beijing). Chittenden was captured with the 203 other Embassy Marine guards on December 8, 1941. He was first sent with all that were now called the North China Marines to Tientsin, and then on to the Woosung POW Camp outside Shanghai. In December 1942, he was moved to Kiangwan POW Camp, another suburb of Shanghai. There the POWs repaired roads and built a huge mountain for a military firing range that they referred to as Mt Fuji. On August 20, 1943, he was transferred from Kiangwan in Shanghai to Japan with 524 POWs to Osaka. He was taken to the POW Camp Tokyo 5-D Kawasaki, which was across from the main gate of a steel mill owned by Nippon Steel Tube & Mining Company (Nippon Kokan, today’s JFE Engineering Corporation). In this primitive and hazardous facility, he worked as a lathe operator and grinder operator. In June 1945, following the American bombings of the Kawasaki area, the POWs were moved to Niigata. Chittenden found himself at POW Camp Tokyo 5-B Niigata as a slave laborer loading and unloading cargo for Niigata Sea and Land Transportation Company or Niigata Kairiku Unso (today’s Rinko Corporation) until the end of the war. The camp Commandant, Lt. Tetsutaro Kato, was a particularly sadistic overseer who personally executed a POW (Frank Spear who is in a famous picture of three men on the Bataan Death March). Although sentenced to death at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, he was released with time served in 1952. Kato wrote I Want To Be A Shellfish [Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai] a novel (and two films) dramatizing and justifying his wartime experiences.  He was liberated on September 4, 1945, and put on a train to Yokohama. He was flown across the Pacific to Oakland, California arriving September 12th. Mr. Chittendan was discharged from the Marines Corps on February 16, 1946, as a Platoon Sergeant. He used the GI Bill to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing in 1949, from the University of Notre Dame and where he met his wife, Peggy, who was a student at the neighboring St. Mary’s. He went to work after graduation at the national headquarters of Sears, Roebuck & Company in downtown Chicago. He was quality assurance manager for the company until he retired in 1980. In retirement, he wrote and published his autobiography, From China Marine to JAP POW: My 1,346 Day Journey Through Hell. He enjoys travel, golf, tennis, scuba diving, and spending time with his family. Mr. Chittenden, a widower, was married for 59 years and had three children, two sons and a daughter
POW# 233

JOSEPH DEMOTT, 97, lives in Lititz, Pennsylvania. He grew up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on August 29, 1939 at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois. He trained as a radio operator with the 10th Air Force, 7th Bombardment Group 22nd Squadron. Mr. DeMott was part of the 22nd Squadron that flew on the Dec 17-18, 1941 from Hamilton Field, California to Hickam Field, Hawaii. As part of Major Kenneth Hobson’s B-17 crew, he helped pioneer the “Pacific route” from Hawaii on January 2, 1942 down through the South Pacific to Australia. Form there, they went to Malang, Java to join the rest of the 22nd on January 14th to reinforce Allied forces in the Netherlands East Indies. On the 15th, the ABDACOM (Australian British Dutch American Command) was formed with the mission to defend the Malay Barrier, which was defined as a line connecting the Malay Peninsula-Sumatra-Java-North Australia. On February 3rd, during a mission over Balikpapan (today’s Jakarta), Mr. DeMott was severely wounded in his leg and sent to a Dutch military hospital in Malang. Confined to hospital bed, he was unable to evacuate with his squadron at the end of February to Australia. The invading Japanese captured him on March 8, 1942. After several months when he was able to walk without crutches, he was sent to the western mountains of Java to a large POW camp for Dutch and British near Bandoeng (today’s Bandung), near Tjimahi that sent details out to do farming. This camp was possibly the Baros 5 Camp near the plantations of Lewigadjah. In late 1943, he was sent to “Bicycle Camp” in Batavia, Java. This camp had housed the Dutch 10th Infantry Battalion in Batavia, and took its name from the battalion’s use of bicycles for transportation. There he helped build fences and dig ditches as well as work on the docks. The prisoners never received official word that the war had ended. They simply realized something had changed when their treatment improved, they were allowed to go outside the Camp, and the Japanese officers no longer carried swords. On September 19, 1945, US Army Special Forces liberated the Camp. Mr. DeMott, starved, beaten and having temporarily lost his eyesight, never lost hope. He flew back to the States via Calcutta, Egypt, the Azores Islands, and Canada. In late October 1945, he arrived at LaGuardia Airport in New York. He was hospitalized on Staten Island, New York before going to Fletcher General Hospital in Cambridge, Ohio. He was discharged from the U.S. Army on May 20, 1946 with two Purple Hearts. Returning home, he used the GI Bill to obtain a BS in Engineering in 1949, from Pennsylvania State University and became an electrical engineer. After graduation, he worked at Sylvania Electric Products Inc. as a production engineer and then in telemetry for the Applied Science Corporation of Princeton (ASCOP). He retired from RCA as design developer, but went on to work as a plant manager in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for Champion Blower & Forge Co. (today’s Champion Fan) for an additional five years. In July 1979, he took full retirement. A Ham radio operator most of his life, he also enjoyed gardening. His wife of 67 years, Kate, died in August 2015.
POW# - unknown

CARL DYER, 91, resides in Oglesby, Illinois. He grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Not a fan of schoolwork, Mr. Dyer at 16 convinced the U.S. Army recruiter that he was 18 and enlisted. Sworn in on March 17, 1941 at Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Little Rock, he was sent immediately to California and Fort McDowell (Angel Island). Barely a month later he was on a troop transport to Manila, arriving May 12, 1941. He was stationed with at Fort William McKinley as a member of the 12th Quartermaster Regiment Philippine Scouts supplying gasoline to the troops on Bataan. After Bataan was surrendered on April 9, 1942, he escaped the next day to Corregidor aboard a fresh water barge from Sisiman Cove near Mariveles—where most of the surrendered troops on Bataan began the Bataan Death March. On Corregidor, he was assigned to the defense of Monkey Point. After surrender on May 6th, he joined thousands of other POW on a small open area, the 92nd Garage, to wait nearly three weeks in the tropical sun with little food or water to be sent by boat to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March" to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Within a few days they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan #3 POW Camp. On November 7, 1942, Mr. Dyer and over 1,400 American POWs were transferred to Japan via Formosa by the Hellship Nagato Maruto. After arriving at the Port of Moji, Mr. Dyer was sent to POW Camp Osaka 4-B Tanagawa where he was a slave laborer for Tobishima-gumi (today’s Tobishima Corporation). There he helped build breakwater for a primitive dry-dock and submarine base. This camp was noted for the severe malnutrition of its prisonsers and an excessive death rate. It was closed March 20, 1945, and he was then moved to Osaka 8-D Naruo a POW camp to provide slave labor for Showa Denkyoku (Showa Electrode Company, Ltd., today’s SEC Carbon, Ltd.) for a graphite factory. This camp was closed in May and he was transferred Osaka 5-B Tsuruga on the Sea of Japan to be a slave stevedore for Tsuruga Harbor Transportation Company (company no longer exists). After the docks were bombed in June, the POWs were shifted between a brickyard and the port. It was at the dock that he listened with the Japanese workers to the Emperor say that the war had ended. After the first food airdrops into his POW camp, he and a number of fellow POWs walked out of the camp and commandeered a train to Tokyo. From there they were flown to Manila on August 29th and then boarded USS Rodman to San Francisco arriving there October 3, 1946. After a check up at Letterman Army Hospital, he was sent home to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He spent several more months at the Hot Springs Army-Navy General Hospital before he was discharged from the Army on March 15, 1946. He took advantage of the GI Bill by taking courses on mechanics at the Fort Smith High School. Mr. Dyer first worked at the Lowell Brickyard in Chicago and then as a tractor operator at the Caterpillar plant in Aurora, Illinois. After retiring in 1985, he and his wife moved to Hawaii, but returned to Illinois in September of 2000. Mr. Dyer was widowed in 2009 after 63 years of marriage to Jean, an Army nurse he met at the Letterman Army Hospital.
POW# 459
Philippines POW# 1-9778

ARTHUR GRUENBERG, 94, lives in Everett, Washington State. Mr. Gruenberg grew up on Long Island, New York and Colorado. He enlisted in the Marine Corps August 1, 1940, in Denver, Colorado and took his training at San Diego’s Marine Corps Recruit Depot. He was soon sent aboard the USS Chaumont (AP-5) via Manila to Shanghai to be part of A Company 1st Battalion of the 4th Marines—best known as the China Marines—that provided security for the Americans in the international settlement. As with most of the China Marines he was evacuated (either SS President Harrison or SS President Madison) November 27-28 to the Philippines to reinforce the defenses of the Islands. Prior to boarding the ship, he volunteered to test a new typhus vaccine with the result he arrived in the Philippines sick with typhus. Sent to Olongapo Naval Station on Subic Bay, he recovered. When war started he was sent to Corregidor and assigned to the 1st Battalion as a runner and telephone messenger through the siege of Corregidor. On May 6th, he delivered the surrender message from Major General Jonathan Wainwright to Lt Colonel Curtis T Beecher who commanded the 1st Battalion on East Sector-From Malinta Hill (inclusive) to the tail of the island. Like most of the 12,000 men on Corregidor, Mr. Gruenberg was crowded into a small open area, the 92nd Garage, to wait nearly three weeks in the tropical sun with little food or water to be sent by boat to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March" to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Within a few days they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp #1. He arrived blind due to a vitamin A deficiency. US Army Dr Samuel Bloom was able to save his right eye’s site (this eye remains 20/20), but not the left. Mr. Gruenberg was eventually able to be sent to do farm work and other labor until he contracted malaria. In July 1944, Mr. Gruenberg, along with 1,540 other POWs, was taken aboard the Hellship Nissyo Maru via Formosa to Japan. After arriving at the port of Moji, Japan, he was sent to the POW Camp Fukuoka 7-B Futase (known as Shin-Iizuka) to be a slave laborer for Japan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd, (Nippon Seitetsu, today’s Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation. The camp is associated with the Fukuoka-Yamaguichi area awarded UNESCO World Industrial Heritage status this past July, albeit without mention of the hundreds of POW slave laborers who toiled there. At first assigned to build air raid shelters, he eventually ended up mining coal. His camp was liberated on September 16, 1945, and the POWs were put on trains to Nagasaki where many boarded Navy transport ships to San Francisco. Returning to the U.S., he spent approximately one year in three military hospitals: Oak Knoll, California; Glenwood Springs, Colorado; and St Albans Military Hospital, New York where they operated, ultimately, unsuccessfully on his left eye. Now a staff sergeant, he was able to reenlist in the Marine Corps under a waiver in September 1946. He was first sent to Washington, DC as a guard at the Naval Shipyard’s Naval Communications Annex. In Washington, he married and had two daughters. He was eventually assigned to the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard graves registration to escort WWII dead home. In the summer of 1950, he was transferred to Camp Pendleton and then to Korea. He arrived in time to participate in the legendary battle of the Chosin Reservoir. He was one of the handful of survivors of Fox Company’s (2n Battalion 7 Marine Rgt 1st ) bitter battle from November 27 through December 2, 1950 to protect, at all costs, a thin Toktong Pass escape route through the steep Nang­nim Mountains(See: The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat).Wounded shortly after this battle, he returned to the front in May until August 1951. Discharged September 10, 1952, he eventually went to work for the Denver water department and in 1954 founded his own excavating company. Moving to Seattle in 1966, he joined the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 302 working on construction project throughout the fast-growing region. He retired in 1980, to travel, fish, and enjoy life. Mr. Gruenberg oral history can be found as part of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.
POW# 599
Philippines PO# 1-9596

GEORGE HIRSCHKAMP, 95, resides in Sandpoint, Idaho. Born in Germany, he came to the U.S. with his mother in 1928, and settled in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn. At 18, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in February 1938, and took his basic training at the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot. He was sent to the San Francisco Naval Station for instruction on becoming a radio communications operator. He was assigned mid-1940 to the 4th Marines as part of a detachment to the U.S. Embassy in Peking to work as a radio operator—part of a small, 130-man support unit stationed there before the war. December 8, 1941, they were all taken prisoner on what was the first day of the war. They were then transferred to Tientsin, followed by Woosung and then Kiangwan, the later two suburbs of Shanghai. At Woosung, Hirschkamp repaired Japanese vehicles and helped build a huge mountain for a military firing range that the POWs referred to as Mt Fuji. In July 1945, he was transferred to Japan via Manchuria and Pusan to northern Japan. He was fist sent to Hokodate #2 Akahira to be a slave laborer for an Asano coal mine owned by Sumitomo Mining (today’s Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation) and then to Hakodate 3-B Utashinai, he also mined coal, this time for the Sorachi Office of Hokkaido Shipping and Mining Company, Ltd., which is today’s Hokkaido Colliery & Steamship Co., Ltd, which is a Mitsui company. He was liberated from this camp on September 15, 1945. The POWs at this camp learned of the end of the war when the camp commander “ lined us up on the parade ground and informed us that hostilities had ceased,” Hirschkamp recalled. “Then we all had a drink of sake. The war had ended. The next morning, we woke up and - lo and behold - they were all gone,” he continued. They had abandoned us. From then on, everything became sweet.” The POWs left the camp on September 17th, and were put aboard a British destroyer and taken to Tokyo for processing before a long ship voyage to the States. After returning from Japan, he used the GI Bill to complete his GED and study mathematics at Morton College in Cicero, Illinois. He also married the woman who waited seven years for him to return from the Marines. Mr. Hirschkamp likes to recount that “When I got home, we dated a couple times and she had the brass to ask me, ‘When are we going to get married, George?’ “I stammered and stuttered and she finally said, ‘It’s June 1 [1946] or never.’ So we got married.” He worked for International Harvester in Illinois and eventually at Ford Aerospace’s plant in Newport Beach, California. He retired in 1980 and traveled the country until his wife of 62 years, Lorraine, passed away.
POW# unknown

GEORGE W. ROGERS, 96, resides in Lynchburg, Virginia. Mr. Rogers grew up in St Louis, Missouri and enlisted in the U.S. Army August 20, 1941, at Jefferson Barracks. He arrived on the Philippines October 1 and was assigned to 4th Chemical Company. At first a clerk/typist at Fort McKinley, he was soon fighting in the defense of Bataan with L Company of the 31st Infantry Regiment (US) after Japan’s December 8 invasion. American forces were short of food, ammunition, and reinforcements throughout the campaign against the better equipped and trained Japanese. All forces on Bataan were surrendered on April 9, 1942, and most were forced on the infamous Bataan Death March. Mr. Rogers endured the 65-mile trek up the Bataan Peninsula experiencing starvation, exhaustion, and beatings while witnessing merciless murders and torture. At the Camp O’Donnell where 1,500 Americans died over four months, he was a gravedigger. In August, he was moved to Cabanatuan #3 to farm rice and vegetables as well as duty building an airfield. On top of the beatings he received from the camp guards, Mr. Rogers and his fellow soldiers suffered through extreme pain in their feet and legs due primarily to dry or dry beriberi, a disease affecting the nerves and muscles. He also survived malaria and spent six months quarantined for what was thought to be amoebic dysentery. On July 17, 1944, he was one of 1541 POWs taken to Japan via Formosa aboard the Hellship Nissyo Maru. During the 18-day trip with barely any food or clean drinking water, extreme heat, rampant illness — both physical and mental—he said,  “I almost lost it, and then … I got a peace that came over me, and I just felt everything is going to be alright, just relax”; Rogers said. “As far as I’m concerned, God was at work again.” After arriving at the port of Moji, Japan, he was sent to POW Camp Fukuoka 3-B Yawata Japan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. (Nippon Seitetsu; today’s Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation) to work in the Yawata steel mill for the rest of the war. Yawata featured Japan’s first blast furnace and was one the Empire’s most important armament makers. It was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud cover from aerial bombing on August 8, 1945, prevented this, but succeed in destroying key production facilities and ending prisoner work at the mill. In July 2015, the site was given UNESCO World Industrial Heritage status, albeit without mention of the hundreds of POW slave laborers—American, British, Australian, Dutch, Portuguese, Jamaican, Indian, Malay, Chinese, and Arabians at the site. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the facilities of Yawata Steel Works in July 2014, to encourage the UNESCO application. On August 15, 1945, the camp commander announced that the war had ended and the guards disappeared. The camp was liberated on September 13th. Mr. Rogers returned to the U.S. a gaunt, 6-foot-3, 85 pounds. Military doctors told him that it was unlikely that he would live past 45 or 50, keep his teeth, or have children. At 96, he retains his teeth, has five children, and displays “a contagious joy.” Mr. Rogers used the G.I. Bill to obtain an accounting degree from St. Louis University. Starting in 1973, Mr. Rogers was the CFO for Reverend Jerry Falwell (founder of the Moral Majority) overseeing his Old Time Gospel Hour television ministry and the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He became Liberty University’s vice president of finance and administration in 1999, through to Rev Falwell’s death in 2007. In 2010, Liberty University named an award in Rogers' honor. The George Rogers Champion of Freedom Award is given annually to a man or woman who served in the United States Armed Forces and went above the call of duty, displaying extraordinary heroism while serving. The award is presented at a Flames football game during Liberty's Military Emphasis Week, held near Veterans Day. A bust of Rogers stands at the gate of Williams Stadium, the home of the Liberty Flames football team, as a tribute to Rogers for his sacrifices. Mr. Rogers was married 67 year to Barbara,who passed away August 2015.
POW# unknown
Philippines POW# 1-06096

JACK DOYLE WARNER, 94, lives in Elk City, Oklahoma. Mr. Warner grew up in western Oklahoma and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on October 18, 1939. After basic training at San Diego’s Marine Corps Recruit Depot his first duty was at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 25 miles north of San Francisco. In the summer of 1940, he was on a 148-day voyage to Shanghai to be part of A Company 1st Battalion of the 4th Marines—best known as the China Marines—that provided security for the Americans in the international settlement. In late November 1941, Mr. Warner thinking he was returning to the U.S. found instead that he and the regiment were being sent to the Philippines to defend the island of Corregidor from a potential Japanese invasion. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed Corregidor. He was stationed at Kindley Airstrip as a rifleman with the 2nd Marine Battalion. With the fall of Corregidor on May 6th, he and most of the 12,000 men on Corregidor were crowded into a small open area, the 92nd Garage, to wait nearly three weeks in the tropical sun with little food or water to be sent by boat to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March" to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Within a few days they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp. In August 1942, his Japanese captors forced him and hundreds of surviving American troops to strip naked to be examined by Japanese military doctors. Warner and 300 Americans picked to be the first group of POWs to go to Japan. On September 21, the POWs were sent to Formosa aboard the Hellship Lima Maru. They spent two months there, ostensibly to learn Japanese. From Taiwan, the POWs were shipped aboard the Dainichi Maru arriving in Moji, Japan on November 25th. At first, Mr. Warner was a slave laborer at POW Camp Tokyo 1-D Yokohama, providing riveter labor for shipyard and ship construction. He was also forced to repair German ships that docked outside the Yokohama harbor. However, he said the Germans fed him better than the Japanese, who limited the POW diet to small amounts of rice and fish heads. “When we went out and riveted on a German ship, we always liked that because they carried hogs on their ships and they fed us two meals,” said Warner, “We got our ration plus what they gave us and we usually carried ours back to give to our buddies.” After the docks were bombed by in May 1945, he was sent to POW Camp Sendai 5-B Kamaishi, and toiled as a mechanic repairing slag cars at iron mill works owned by Japan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd, (today’s Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation). At the camp, Warner volunteered to take a beating for a Navy sailor who he said was in bad shape. “I don’t know what he had done, but he was a good kid and I knew him,” said Warner. “We knew he couldn’t take it if they give him a real beating.” In August 1945, he twice escaped from the camp. Miraculously, Camp Commander Makoto Inaki (from April 1944) did not have the escapees executed, but instead had them beaten and confined to the guardhouse. The second time he escaped, the war ended and he was advised by local Japanese to return to the camp for repatriation. He and a buddy jumped the evacuation team to Sendai and made their way to Yokohama. After a series of adventures included a tour of the city sanctioned by the commanding general, they flew out of Tokyo and island hopped to Oakland. On May 24, 1946 he returned to civilian life. After returning to his home, Mr. Warner used the G.I. Bill education benefits to take vocational agricultural classes at Hammon, Oklahoma’s high school. For 17 years he farmed until 1961 when his property became part of Foss Lake reservoir. He joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Retiring in 1982, he travelled with his wife, June, to all 50 states and many foreign countries. Married 68 years, he was widowed in 2014.
POW# 4463
Taiwan POW# 972

CLIFFORD WARREN, 91, resides in Shepherd, Texas. At 16, Mr. Warren left the family farm near Houston, Texas without his parent’s permission and enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1941. Leaving behind the family’s farm was an easy decision, considering they had already experienced three crop failures, including two floods and one fire. His parents did not know where he was until he arrived in the Philippines aboard the USAT Republic on April 22, 1941. There he immediately sent his parents a letter explaining where he was and how long he believed he would be there. He became a member of the 60th Coast Artillery Regiment, 1st Battalion Battery “D” or “Denver” manning 3”anti-aircraft guns near Kindley Field on Corregidor Island. This battery was the first confront Japanese invading amphibious forces in May 1944. Unfortunately, shelling from Bataan had killed their commanding officer in last part of April, which undermined their effectiveness. With the fall of Corregidor on May 6th, he and most of the 12,000 men on Corregidor were crowded into a small open area, the 92nd Garage, to wait nearly three weeks in the tropical sun with little food or water to be sent by boat to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March" to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Within a few days they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp. He was placed at a work detail to build an airfield in Lipa City in Batangas Province for 18 months. Most of the men were transferred from here in March of 1944 to construct another runway at Camp Murphy. In the summer of 1944, he was shipped to Japan via the Hellship Nissyo Maru. Upon arrival he was sent to POW Camp Nagoya 1-B Kamioka, where he was a slave laborer to mine lead and zinc for Mitsui Mining Co., the predecessor of today’s Nippon Coke & Engineering Co., Ltd. In July 2015, the site was given UNESCO World Industrial Heritage status, albeit without mention of the hundreds of POW slave laborers who toiled there. The camp, reportedly was for “hard cases” who were difficult for the Japanese to manage. Mr. Warner recalls that the POWs were repeatedly told that they would be killed if and when the country was invaded. Twice, he said, the guards would take them out and have them sit on the roads alongside the mountain. Then set up machine guns at either end of the road. After awhile they would dismantle the guns and take them back to work. He thinks they were practicing what they would do if there had been a land invasion. Toward end of August the Japanese camp commander escorted the POWs south by train. On the middle of the third day they could go no further due to track damage, but American forces were waiting there to truck any POW's who arrived back to Tokyo. From there they were flown to Okinawa. He remembers being able to smell beef stew on the airfield there from the field kitchens near the beach. But the first thing he wanted was coffee as he had not had any in four years! Five days later they were flown on B-24s to the Philippines. In the Philippines he was actually able to connect with a brother, Willie Kelso Warren, who he had not seen since before the war. He went by troop ship from there to San Francisco. He turned 21 the day they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge October 15, 1945. After two days in San Francisco, he was sent by train to the McCloskey General Hospital in Temple, Texas (today’s Olin E. Teague Veterans' Medical Center in Temple, Texas). He was to be there for three months but was soon furloughed to spend the time at his parent's in Leggitt, Texas or in Beaumont, Texas courting, Ivene, his wife to be. He was discharged at Fort Sam Houston January 29, 1946, and married Ivene on October 6, 1946. Mr. Warren tried night school at the University of Houston and working days at Ford Motor Company. Severe PTSD made this difficult. He switched to working various positions operating machinery and in 1965 went to work for Brown & Root Engineering and Construction (today’s KBR Inc.) He helped run the engine rooms for the big offshore derrick barges. Later he was in the first group of Safety Officers Brown & Root trained to meet the new OSHA safety regulations. He in 1986 retired as the #2 Safety Man for Brown & Root construction of the nuclear power plant at Glen Rose, Texas, known as Comanche Peak. He was widowed in 1990 and remarried in 1997 to Myrtle Emmons.
POW# 488
Philippines POW# 1-1350