History’s Shadow on Japanese Prime Minister’s U.S. Visit

Robinette 2nd from left

This week’s Japan-Philippines-U.S. trilateral summit comes alongside the 82nd anniversary of the Bataan Death March. 

By Patrick Regan and Mindy Kotler Smith

Patrick Regan is a member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society (ADBC-MS) and the grandson of U.S. Army Air Corps Tech. Sgt. Donald C. Regan, who survived the Bataan Death March and 41 months as a POW of the Japanese, including two years at Hirohata Camp 12-B working for Nippon Steel.

Mindy Kotler Smith is also a member of the ADBC-MS and great niece of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineer Fletcher Wood, who survived the siege of Corregidor but died in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. She is the editor of this blog.

The Diplomat, April 09, 2024

Few weeks are as historic in the shared history of Japan, the Philippines, and the United States as this one. The focus this week will be on these countries’ three leaders — Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, U.S. President Joe Biden, and Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. — and their summit in Washington. But the anniversaries of Imperial Japan’s worst war crimes this week cast a shadow over their meetings.

More than 80 years later, those acts remain largely forgotten even though they underlie one of the key topics Kishida is expected to raise at his summit with Biden: Nippon Steel’s attempt to acquire U.S. Steel.

By acknowledging Japan and Nippon Steel’s role in the mistreatment of prisoners of war (POWs) during World War II, Kishida has an opportunity to not only do the right thing but also connect in a meaningful way with Biden and Marcos, both of whom have direct family ties to those atrocities.

The Bataan Death March

Eighty-two years ago, on April 9, 1942, the fighting on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula came to an end. For four months, American and Filipino troops had done what no one in the Pacific could do — halt Imperial Japan’s sweep across Asia. Through persistence and ingenuity, without air or naval support, they mounted an unexpectedly stiff resistance against the invaders.

Resupply and reinforcements were not coming, though, and the troops on Bataan were starving and out of ammunition. Faced with a certain massacre, the U.S. commanding general, Edward P. King, disobeyed orders and surrendered his men. But what followed was worse than combat.

On the first day of the surrender, Japanese troops looted the personal possessions of their prisoners, murdered those found with Japanese money, bayonetted to death the sick, and raped the one American nurse they could find.

The next day, April 10, the men were organized in groups of 100 and force-marched up the peninsula in the sweltering tropical heat. They were denied water, food, and medicine. Japanese officers beheaded men at will. The guards killed laggards and those they believed disrespectful. Japanese military vehicles crushed men into the road beneath them, while their occupants laughed. The prisoners’ agonizing 65-mile trek lasted anywhere from four days to two weeks.

What became known as the infamous Bataan Death March was only part of a 100-mile journey to an improvised POW camp. The next segment was 28 miles by rail where the men were packed, standing, in metal boxcars. Many died from heat exhaustion, dysentery, suffocation, or malaria. Survivors then stumbled the next several miles to the unfinished barracks of Camp O’Donnell. The camp contained only two water spigots for the more 55,000 men. In the first month, thousands died of disease and despair.

Among those surviving the march and the first months of imprisonment was a distant cousin of Biden, John Robinette, a Port Clinton, Ohio, soldier with Company C of the 192nd Provisional Tank Battalion. Months before, he had participated in America’s first winning tank battle of WWII. Robinette died of beriberi that November.

Also surviving the march was Marcos’ father and namesake, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who was an officer with the Philippine Army. Starting in June 1942, the Japanese, to reduce deaths and to reward collaboration, began to release Filipino prisoners of war. Ferdinand was released in August.

Thus, when Kishida sits down with his American and Filipino counterparts for a trilateral summit on April 11, he will face two leaders with direct ties to the Bataan Death March. It will not be his first time in that setting.

In October 2013, then-Foreign Minister Kishida met with two Bataan Death March survivors and one widow. They were part of a visiting delegation of American former prisoners of war of Japan seeking understanding and reconciliation from their former captors. Kishida expressed deep remorse for their suffering.

Despite this intimate history, it is reported that the Japanese prime minister will not express his country’s remorse over World War II in his speech at the U.S. Congress on April 11. Foreign Ministry officials claim Japan’s position on the war “has been settled to some extent” and Kishida “will not touch on it in the speech.”

Surviving as a Prisoner of Japan

April 11 is remembered in the Philippines as the anniversary of the Pantingan River Massacre. Lost and starving Filipino and American officers of the 91st Philippine Army Division missed the April 9 surrender deadline. The commander of Japan’s 65th Brigade, to whom they eventually surrendered, reprimanded the 400 men for being late. He then ordered his officers to behead the defenseless prisoners and directed his enlisted men to bayonet to death those missed by the swords. The slaughter reportedly took two hours.

Surviving imprisonment and hard labor in the Philippines was just the beginning for those who surrendered on Bataan. Starting in August 1942, the Japanese began shipping American and European prisoners from the Philippines to Japan to be used as slave laborers by national corporations. The prisoners were told if they did not work, they would not eat.

One of those corporations was Nippon Steel.

Nippon Steel

In his visit this week, Kishida will present Nippon Steel as the face of Japan. His message will be that the company, like Japan, should be viewed as a trusted ally that will enhance security cooperation by improving the U.S. industrial base. Nowhere will he mention the company’s unfinished business from the war.

Nippon Steel, like all major Japanese wartime corporations, requisitioned prisoner-of-war labor and maintained prisoner labor camps. The firm was so vital to Japanese war production that one of its steel mills was to be a target of an atomic bomb. At its mines, mills, and railyards, Nippon Steel used 6,000 Allied prisoners of war. At least 2,000 were American, most of whom were survivors of the conquest of the Philippines that began with the fall of Bataan.

At Nippon Steel facilities, the POWs were starved, abused, and denied adequate medical care. Company employees willfully beat the POWs working alongside them. Barracks were unheated, infested with vermin, and overcrowded. Ten percent of the prisoners died.

Nippon Steel still refuses to acknowledge that Americans suffered in forced service to the company during World War II. That history is nowhere to be found on Nippon Steel’s website, which devotes more than 1,000 words to a timeline of the company’s heritage. The timeline, which goes back to 1908, ignores the 1940s entirely.

Nippon Steel’s exploitation of POW labor during the war is also ignored at two of its functioning steel mills that were designated in 2015 as UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites. Despite a UNESCO reprimand, the Japanese government refuses to provide “the full history” of these sites by explaining how POWs helped maintain wartime production.

Nippon Steel has invested in a slew of Washington, D.C., lobbyists to make the case for the company’s purchase of U.S. Steel. The prime minister is supposed to build on their imagery of Nippon Steel as a responsible, technologically sophisticated corporation sensitive to American interests. Ignored is that the company has long failed at its most basic expression of respect for American workers. It has never acknowledged or apologized for its mistreatment of American “laborers.”

The Opportunity

Kishida declared last year at the U.N. that he wanted to emphasize “human dignity” in international cooperation. Here is his chance. He can suggest that Nippon Steel do something more meaningful with its efforts to gain political support for the deal than to emphasize that it is good business.

There is precedent for such a move. In 2015, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation became the first and only Japanese company to apologize and present an atonement payment for using American slave labor during the war. The admission was hailed at the time as an important step in moving Japanese industry out of the shadow of its wartime atrocities, although no other Japanese companies have done the same.

Nippon Steel now has a rare opportunity to make a statement similar to Mitsubishi’s. In the face of recent government leaders reframing the Japanese purely as victims during World War II and to rewrite history downplaying the plight of those who suffered under Japan’s rampage across the Pacific, this would be a timely trust-building corporate and national move.

In addition to acknowledgement and an apology, Nippon Steel, along with the Japanese government, would ideally devote resources annually to educational efforts both in Japan and the U.S. to make the history of American POWs in Japan more widely known. There should be more than a few plaques at steel plants. Virtual visits to former POW camps, digitization of records, exchange programs for families, and a national memorial would be appropriate. Both Japan and Nippon Steel have to show they are serious.

These efforts are especially important now, nearly 80 years since the end of the war, as the living memory of wartime events slips away.

It’s too late now for the thousands of Americans who slaved away for Nippon Steel to get the apology and recognition they deserve. That includes the father of the famed Smothers Brothers, the grandfather of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Olympian Louis Zamperini, whose remarkable story of survival was depicted in the book and movie “Unbroken.”

But it’s not too late for Nippon Steel, with Kishida’s encouragement, to face its past directly so it can move on to its future, potentially with U.S. Steel, with some measure of honor and trust.

Left behind by Congress, again

An effort to honor America’s POWs leaves far too many behind

By Patrick Regan And Mindy Kotler Smith, Opinion Contributors

The Hill, 9/16/22

Today, on National POW/MIA Recognition Day, we pause to remember the suffering of all American prisoners of war.

The Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Gold Medal Act (S. 1079), now pending in Congress, seeks to award Congressional Gold Medals to some of those POWs who fought the Japanese in the early months of World War II. Credit to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) for championing the bill and working to honor these men and women whose stories and sacrifices must not be forgotten.

But the act in its current form is insufficient.

As written, it would honor only those who served on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines. It leaves out Americans who also tried with no hope of resupply and antiquated weapons to stave off Japan’s lightning advance through Southeast Asia from Aug. 8, 1941, to June 10, 1942 — in Midway, Wake Island, Guam, Java, all of the Philippine Islands, the Aleutians and at sea.

These are the Americans who President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in August 1943, when the outcome of WWII was still uncertain, “will be remembered so long as men continue to respect bravery, devotion, and determination.” This still holds true.

The Philippines is often central to the most-common stories of American POW suffering and survival, in part because that is where so many endured the infamous Bataan Death March. The Americans there held out for months in 1942 on the Bataan peninsula of Luzon and finally at the tiny fortress islands in Manila Bay, the best known being Corregidor, until they could no longer hold off the resupplied Japanese.

But the stories of survival and subsequent Japanese brutality are no less remarkable in other parts of the Philippines or the Pacific theater.

The few hundred Marines and Navy sailors left to defend Guam were overrun by the Japanese in a matter of days by Dec. 10, 1941. Guam was the first American territory to be occupied by the Japanese during the war. The battle’s survivors would endure nearly the entire war as prisoners of the enemy.

At Wake Island, more than 400 Marines, 1,200 unarmed civilians and 45 Chamorro Pan Am airline employees heroically held off a Japanese armada for an unheard of nearly two weeks from Dec. 8-Dec 23, 1941. Marine Corps aviator Maj. Henry T. Elrod —aka Hammerin’ Hank — was the first U.S. pilot to sink a warship from a fighter plane. Elrod was killed on the last day of the battle and was the first aviator to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II.

Hundreds of miles south of the Indonesian island Java, on March 1, 1942, the USS Edsall’s skipper, Lt. Joshua Nix of Memphis, Tenn., laid down smokescreens and followed a series of evasive maneuvers that so frustrated four Japanese warships that air support had to be called to sink her. It took two ferocious hours of combat to end the Edsall. A small number of the 187 men on board were rescued. Their beheaded bodies were discovered in a mass grave in Celebes after the war.

Seventy-seven years ago this month, American rescue teams liberated American and Allied POWs scattered throughout Japan’s 775 POW camps across the Pacific. In Japan, one of those was Hirohata Camp 12-B, south of Osaka. Hirohata housed 300 Americans, one Australian and one Englishman. The men were survivors from Guam, Wake Island, all over the Philippines, USS Yorktown and USS Penguin.

When word came to camp in late August that the war was over, Marine gunner Earl B. Ercanbrack gathered the Americans in the courtyard of the camp, where for the previous two years they had counted off in Japanese every morning before going off to backbreaking slave labor in a Nippon Steel mill and on its dock. The civilian overseers treated them as criminals and subjected them to ridicule and cruel, capricious punishments.

According to what Ercanbrack later told his hometown newspaper, The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, he ordered the camp’s guards to remove the Japanese flag from the 75-foot pole in the courtyard. It was replaced by an American flag hastily sewn together using a white parachute, red curtain and two blue Japanese shirts.

As the makeshift American flag rose over the camp, someone started singing “God Bless America.” Others joined in, until 300 American POWs — finally free — crescendoed in unison with the song’s final line: “God bless America, my home sweet home.”

Think about those 300 men — tortured, starved and ordered to work as slave labor for years — proudly uniting to sing “God Bless America.” Now imagine awarding Congressional Gold Medals to only those in that 300 who had served in Bataan and Corregidor.

It would be wise for Congress to follow the Hirohata prisoners’ example of unity and revise the bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to all Americans who participated in those first desperate battles of WWII in the Pacific.

Ercanbrack, who fought and was captured at Guam and organized the U.S. flag raising in the Hirohata camp, would not be eligible for the Gold Medal now under consideration. That’s just not good enough.

Patrick Regan and Mindy Kotler Smith are members of the American Defenders of Bataan and the Corregidor Memorial Society and are descendants of men who fought in The Philippines. Regan’s grandfather, U.S. Army Air Corps SSgt Donald Regan, survived the Bataan Death March and Nippon Steel’s Hirohata POW camp in Japan. 

‘I didn’t think I would live this long

World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor Eddie Graham turns 100 on September 5th

The Wichita Eagle, September 2, 2017 5:47 PM

BY STAN FINGER

Eddie Graham never expected to see this day.

Not after trudging more than 60 miles through the jungles of the Philippines at gunpoint in what became known as the Bataan Death March in World War II.
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Or seeing fellow prisoners marched away, never to return. Or subsisting on a cup of rice a day, often less because he would sneak some of his portion to others in poor health.

Or digging a new trench every day to bury those who had died overnight, sometimes stacking the bodies four or five deep.

“No, I didn’t think I would live this long,” Graham said softly as he looked around at the large crowd gathered in north Wichita to celebrate his 100th birthday on Saturday. “But I’m still here. Somebody’s watching over me.”

Graham’s birthday is actually on Tuesday, but celebrating it on Saturday carried significance: it not only meant relatives could converge on Wichita from around the country, it was the same day Japan formally surrendered aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in 1945, ending World War II.

Barely more than 50 survivors of the Bataan Death March are still alive.

“When I was a kid, my aunt — Eddie’s wife — told us not to ask him questions because it would cause him to have nightmares at night,” said Wanda Graham, who lives in Portales, N.M. “So we never talked about it.”

Graham kept those horrific memories tucked away until he was into his 90s, when the brother of his caretaker talked him into speaking to a class at a Maize school. That brother is now the mayor of Wichita.

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Graham voluntarily enlisted in the New Mexico National Guard and was assigned to the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment at an American base in the Philippines two months before the attacks on Pearl Harbor December 1941. He fought in the Battle of Bataan and then with nearly 75,000 American and Filipino troops forced on the 65 mile infamous Bataan Death March to Camp O'Donnell. When the camp closed he was transferred to Camp Cabanatuan to work in the fields. On 20 September 1943 with 850 prisoners he was taken aboard the Taga Maru in Manila, also known as the Coral Maru.Seventy men died during the 15 day voyage to Moji, Japan via Formosa. In Japan, he was taken to Osaka where he became a slave laborer at a steel mill for Nippon Steel in Hirohata Osaka 12-B POW Camp (also known as Harima "O" Camp or Hirohata Divisional Camp). Nippon Steel still exists today as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation. This company has yet to issue an apology to the hundreds of Allied POW slave laborers it used against the Geneva Convention during the War. Interestingly, former Amb. Ichiro Fujisaki, who arranged for Japan's official apology to the POWs in 2009 and reconciliation trips, is on the company's board.

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The memories have been trickling out since then, friends and relatives say.

He has never considered himself a hero. He credits his survival to faith and good fortune, friends and family say.

Mayor Jeff Longwell said he asked Graham where he found the strength to persevere during those dark days. Prayer, Graham told him.

One of the few personal items Graham was allowed to keep as a prisoner was his rosary. A devout Catholic, he prayed that rosary every day.

There are moments during his time as a prisoner of war for which there is no explanation, relatives said.

One was when the prisoners were separated into two long lines. Graham was in one line, but felt uneasy about it.

“He didn’t know why, but he felt like he needed to get into the other one,” said Janelle Longwell, the sister-in-law of his caretaker.

When the guards moved out of view, Graham slipped into the other line. The line of prisoners he had been in was marched into the jungle — and never returned.

One day in camp, Graham and a few other prisoners were given red ribbons, Wendy Graham said. Filled with another uneasy feeling, Graham hid the ribbon in the dirt when no one was looking.

He then darted over to the prisoners without ribbons. The prisoners with ribbons were never seen again.

After he was finally liberated, Graham returned to the U.S. and settled into civilian life. He married soon after the war and raised a family, working as a carpenter.

He has always laughed easily and forgiven quickly, relatives say. He harbored no bitterness toward his captors or the Japanese soldiers.

“They were just doing their job,” he told family.

He’s almost impossible to beat at cards and his mind is still sharp at 100, his sister-in-law Angie Graham said.

Graham is more than willing to go serve his country again if called, Longwell said, though he admits that at 100 he doesn’t move as fast as he once did.

“A few years ago, I asked him, ‘What’s the best thing that’s happened to you? What’s the best thing that you’ve experienced?’ ” Wendy Graham said. “And he said, ‘Life.’

“He realized that was the most valuable thing that he had.”

Not the last Guam POW Survivor

click to order

With the beginning of the year-long claims period for civilian survivors (Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act) of Japan's brutal occupation of Guam, December 10, 1941 to August 10, 1944, attention is also focusing on the American military men and women who were captured on Guam. The Pacific territory was the first American outpost to fall to Japan. Roger Mansell's Captured is the definitive book on the American POWs from Guam.

On April 27th, Navy Lt. Jack Schwartz celebrated his 102nd birthday in Hanford, California. At 99, in 2014, he returned to Japan as a guest of the Japanese government hoping to make amends for the damage and suffering Imperial Japan inflicted upon him. His Congressman, David G. Valadao celebrated Jack's birthday with recognition in the Congressional Record. Jack, however, wants it known that he has two great grandchildren, not one.

Also in April, a former Navy Pharmacist Mate captured on Guam released his memoirs.  Peter B. Marshall spoke to a reporter from the Defense Department about his ordeal and new book, 1368 Days.

Peter B. Marshall shows off his new book

Fighting a Different War

DVIDS Media, June 15, 2017

Story by Lance Cpl. Isaac Martinez, Marine Corps Air Station Yuma

Prescott Valley, Arizona, is a warm and sunny far cry from the brutal camps where the Japanese held American prisoners of war on mainland Japan during World War II. Peter B. Marshall has known both places intimately.

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Growing up in the midst of the Great Depression, Marshall’s family had no car, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no indoor heating. The nearest school, which his father built, was miles away. From an early age, he remembers walking three miles to school each day.

Everything that Marshall’s family had was either made by them or bought in trade. His father, a farmer, worked very hard to yield his crops and maintain one of the best gardens in town. In addition, his father ran a small-home tomato canning factory, owned a blacksmith shop, a fence-making machine, and a mill for which he could provide other services. 

Marshall’s mother raised pedigreed chickens, selling their eggs to the hatchery, and sold cream and male calves. When it came to feeding her children, hot cereal with milk, cornmeal mush, and rice were staples. Corn was eaten in season and meat was prepared, if one of the kids caught a squirrel or rabbit, earlier that day.

Despite all of this, he and his siblings always had plenty of food and warm clothing; they lived a good life, Marshall said.

“After high school, there were no jobs,” he explained. “So I joined the Navy when I was 18. I had no trouble with the training in Great Lakes, Illinois, and after training, we were given ten days of boot leave to go home.”

Marshall did not know, however, that this would be the last time he would see home until late 1945.

Marshall’s unique experience in the Navy helped him overcome the many obstacles he’s faced in his life, including outliving many of his beloved friends and family members.

Upon his return from boot leave, Marshall didn’t know what job he wanted, so he chose to become a hospital corpsman. He passed the school with high grades, and received orders to start working in the surgery ward at US Naval Hospital San Diego. There, he quickly became proficient in his specialty.

Marshall never thought that he would be sent overseas, yet he got orders to report to the destroyer base to be transported to Guam. He had never even heard of Guam. He may as well have been given orders to the moon; it was all foreign for him. Marshall left for Guam February 5, 1941.

Marshall was assigned the night shift at the naval hospital in Guam. One night, a patient had a heart attack and Marshall called the officer on duty. While he waited, he prepared the operating room and even had the first syringe, which he knew the incoming doctor would ask for, ready. Seconds later, Dr. Van Peenen, the doctor on duty, urgently rushed in the room and asked for a syringe, which was handed to him by the young, calm Marshall.

After the incident, Van Peenen spoke with Marshall and told him that he was impressed with how Marshall had handled the situation. He asked Marshall to work with him as his instrument nurse in the operating room and Marshall agreed. Marshall quickly became Van Peenen’s favorite instrument nurse, learning which hand to place the instruments in and always providing the doctor with the appropriate tool.

On December 8, 1941, Dr. Van Peenen was late to work; he was never late. In Hawaii, six hours behind Guam by the global time zones, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had begun. The U.S. was officially at war. The consequences for Guam, a tactical location for the enemy, were going to be swift and terrible.

That’s when the hospital commander decided that all of the worst cases were to be sent to Van Peenen’s operating room, and that Marshall and Van Peenen were not allowed to leave the room. Lunch was brought to them by the commander himself; they ate their sandwiches as he solemnly explained that the Japanese were all over the island and that by tomorrow, they would either be killed or captured.

The next day, Marshall and his compatriots were prisoners of war. Marshall and 19 others were selected to care for the remaining patients, all crammed into a single ward. Later, the Japanese called the 20 outside to face a line of machine guns. This was a firing squad, and Marshall was forced to face his imminent execution. Their captors were laughing and joking while they recited Japanese propaganda to the prisoners.

“The smirks on their faces turned my utter fear into utter hatred,” Marshall said.

Marshall quickly made peace with death and vowed that he would die with honor and not do anything to shame his beloved country. The stress of the machine gun ordeal left Marshall, a man with remarkable memory, unable to remember the following three weeks.

At the hospital, there was no time to relax, because the guards were always bothering the prisoners or mistreating them. A month later, when the hospital prisoners were being moved to [by passenger ship to mainland Japan] the town of Zentsuji, Japan [Hiroshima #1-B], they met up with another group of prisoners that was being held outside the hospital. They told horrible stories to Marshall and the others of beheaded Marines and meager daily rations of one potato a day. At Zentsuji, the men were put to work in the mountains, moving heavy rocks.

Just as the prisoners had gotten used to the schedule of the hard labor in Zentsuji, the prisoners were moved again, this time to Osaka [Records say Hirohata Osaka 12-B, where they were slave laborers for Nippon Steel however he was most likely at Osaka Main Camp #1 Chikko where they were slave laborers for Nippon Express]. Marshall realized that he and the others were “in it for the long haul.” The war was not going to be over soon, and he was sure the prisoners were going to be at the camp for a while. All of the prisoners started forming groups of two or three, for the sake of increasing their chance of survival.

Marshall formed a bond with Alfred Mosher and Albert Schwab. The three vowed to look out for each other. They agreed that if any one of them received special items, like soap or food, that it would be split among them. Another condition was that if one of them got sick, the other two would take care of him.

One day, Marshall realized he was having trouble breathing. There was a fluid filling his lung cavity, partially collapsing the lung. Marshall was terrified because getting sick in the camp meant death. He witnessed several prisoners get sent to the medical hospital, but come back a hollow shell or never return at all.

Marshall didn’t want to be put on the sick list, so he did his best to keep it a secret from the guards. Mosher and Schwab helped him every night to the top shelf, his “bunk,” in the small, cramped room where the prisoners slept. He believes that their help is one of the reasons that he is still alive today.

“They kept telling me, ‘Just breathe, dammit!’” he explained. “At the time it was very difficult for me to breathe, I could only breathe sitting up.”

On June 1, 1945, on a work detail, Marshall heard the loud hum of a dozen mechanical beasts overhead: a group of B-29 Superfortresses. The aircraft began to pummel the camp below with bombs that crackled and breathed death with each monstrous roar, hoping to remove the Japanese presence. The American bombers were unaware that this was a prisoner camp, so the attack lasted a long four hours. The camp was so damaged that the Japanese were forced to relocate the prisoners to Fushiki [Nagoya 10-B, liberated from this camp].

Months later, Marshall, on another work detail, saw all the Japanese guards gathering around a radio [August 15, 1945], listening like their lives depended on it. Within minutes the guards deserted the camp, leaving just the prisoners and one Japanese guard who spoke English. The guard told the prisoners that he would help them as best he could, but getting food would be a big problem.

Japan surrendered shortly after, and Marshall and the others were promptly air-dropped food and cigarettes. They were soon picked up and taken back to Guam for medical examinations September 8, 1945. Marshall had been a prisoner of war for 1,368 days: the entire duration of the war in the Pacific Theater.

When Marshall returned home, he discovered that his father, whom he had not seen for more than four years, had passed away during his captivity. Marshall was heartbroken that he never gave his father a hug, or told him that he loved him.

Marshall had a difficult time adjusting back to normal life during the 90-day rehabilitation that the prisoners received. During his time home, he met Faye Elder through a friend. The two went on several dates, and he knew he wanted her to be his. He proposed right before he left for the U.S. Naval Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma.

There, Marshall was struck with tuberculosis, and had to spend the next two years in numerous hospitals until he was medically discharged from the Navy.

Although he was upset, he figured that now was the perfect time to start tending to his family. Together, the Marshalls had two daughters, Cynthia and Beverly, who enjoyed a close-knit family. The two warmly remember their father, and how he took great care of them.

“My dad has always been my hero,” Cynthia said. “As a little kid, he was always there. Daddy was strong and he was handsome, and he took good care of us.”

Peter Marshall is now the last living prisoner of war who was captured from Guam [not true as of June 2017) during World War II. He resides in Prescott Valley, Arizona, with his daughters, whom now take care of him.

Marshall’s wife, Faye, passed away in 2013; she is buried in National Memorial Cemetery in Cave Creek, Arizona, an hour away from Prescott Valley, and where Marshall plans to be buried when his time comes. Together they will be in good company, alongside veterans, heroes, and those who heard their nation’s call.