That Famous Photo on Bataan - No Survivors

Captured Japanese Photo, National Archives and Records 
Identifier:  NWDNS-127-N-114541

Bataan Death March The First Day

April 9, 1942

From left to right 

Private First Class Samuel Stenzler (September 15, 1895-May 26, 1942)

Private First Class Frank Spear 

(April 15, 1919-July 9, 1945) 

Captain James McDonald Gallagher 

(October 18, 1915-April 9, 1942) 

Their hands are bound because they were found to possess either Japanese money, personal photos of Japanese, or some other contraband. The figure to the extreme right is a Japanese soldier, who the three appear to be listening to.  None of the three men would survive captivity.

Samuel Stenzler was born in Tluste, Poland (then part of Austria) to a Jewish family and immigrated to the United States as a child. He married and resided in San Antonio, Texas, applying for American citizenship in 1909. Stenzler registered for the draft in World War I and was a member of the American Expeditionary Force. He returned to civilian life following the war, but after the death of his wife, he rejoined the United States Army on February 27, 1940. He was assigned to Company C, 31st Infantry Regiment of the Philippine Division, the premier American fighting unit in the Philippines. The 31st Regiment fought in the Battles of Layac (January 6, 1942) and Abucay Hacienda (January 17-24, 1942). C Company renamed the Abucay battlefield "Dead Men's Hill" because of their losses and the high number of Japanese casualties. The 31st Infantry Regiment fought a delaying action through April 1942 but was short of food, ammunition, and reinforcements throughout the campaign; the unit never had more than 60% of its authorized strength available. Company C was surrendered on April 9, 1942 with the rest of the 31st Regiment. Stenzler, 46, died at Camp O'Donnell on May 26, 1942, probably because of disease and starvation. His remains were repatriated and reburied at Long Island National Cemetery on October 18, 1949.

Frank Spear was born in Ledalis, Missouri. A Mormon, Spear enlisted on August 13, 1941 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and arrived in Manila aboard one of the last transports before the war began and was assigned to the Far East Air Force's 4th Chemical Company (Aviation). When the 31st Infantry was depleted in combat, Spear and the rest of 4th Chemical were assigned to the regiment because they had infantry training. Spears served with I Company after the Battle of Abucay Hacienda. After surviving Camp O'Donnell, Spear was sent on the hellship Koho Maru on September 20, 1943 to Tokyo POW Camp Niigata Camp 5-B, arriving in Osaka, Japan on October 5. Camp Commandant Lt. Tetsutaro Kato personally executed Spear on July 9, 1945, after Spear became insane with hunger and had attempted to escape several times. Spear was bayoneted in front of the whole camp. Kato was sentenced to death for killing Spear by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, but his sentence was commuted to 20 years by General Douglas MacArthur. When control of Kato was returned to the Japanese government in 1950, he was released with time served in 1952. Kato wrote Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai [I Want To Be A Shellfish] a novel dramatizing his wartime experiences and incarceration, claiming he was ordered to kill Spear by his superiors. The novel was made into a successful television movie in 1959 by Tokyo Broadcasting Service, and remade for television in 2007 and into a theatrical film in 2008. Spear's insanity, brought on by years of malnutrition, confinement and torture, is not mentioned, nor is Spear mentioned by name. Spear is memorialized at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

James M. Gallagher was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and graduated from Georgetown University in 1936. He attended Reserve Officers Training while in college. After college he joined the United States Army. When he arrived in the Philippines, he was assigned as a training officer to the 33rd Infantry Regiment of the 31st Infantry Division of the Philippine Army. Gallagher was killed the day this photo was taken or soon after. His family published a book of his letters home in memory of him. Gallagher was also honored in the annual of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia. Gallagher was left off the official Prisoner of War rolls because he died on the Bataan Death March; his body was never recovered. He is also memorialized at Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. Gallagher was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

The Last Train

October 14th is Railway Day in Japan. It celebrates the opening day in 1872 of Japan's first railway, which was between Shimbashi Station in Tokyo and Yokohama. This was a significant step in the modernization of Japan.

October 17th is celebrated by only a few. It is remembered, however, as the day in 1943 of the opening ceremonies of the Thai-Burma Death Railway. Engine C5631, built by Nippon Sharyo in 1938 at its Narumi plant, was the locomotive used at the opening. It was hauling a cargo of Comfort Women.

This notorious engine now sits restored at the entrance of the Yasukuni Shrine's war museum in Tokyo. The museum celebrates the "Bushido" of Imperial Japan's military and it success in liberating Asia. A recent article in the right wing propaganda online magazine Japan Forward highlights the annual celebration for this wartime relic. The author dismisses the atrocities associated with building the infamous tract. 

Between June 1942 and October 1943 the POWs and forced laborers laid some 258 miles (415 km) of track from Ban Pong, Thailand (roughly 45 miles [72 km] west of Bangkok), to Thanbyuzayat, Burma (roughly 35 miles [56 km] south of Mawlamyine). Japanese forced approximately 200,000 Asian conscripts and over 60,000 Allied POWs to construct the Burma Railway. Among them were nearly 700 Americans, survivors of the USS Houston and the 131st Field Artillery/2nd Battalion (known as the “Texas Lost Battalion”), both captured on Java.

Ralph Levenberg

The truth is that more than 100,000 Asian and Allied POWs died in its making from abuse, torture, starvation, and lack of medical care. No one is sure how many of 200,000 Asian laborers died, as the Japanese did not consider them human enough to count. There were Allied POWs. As the dead cannot speak, I urge readers to comment on the piece and alert veterans groups in Australia, England, and the Netherlands. Japan Forward was created in January 2017 by the rightwing Sankei Shimbun as part of the Abe Government's stepped up PR and history revision campaign.

October 18th (2019) was the funeral for former POW of Japan Air Force Major Ralph Levenberg (September 12, 1920 – July 29, 2018) and his wife Kathie at Arlington National Cemetery. They were buried with full military honors: an Air Force Rabbi, a horse-drawn caisson, an Air Force casket team, an Air Force firing party (three shots), a bugler, an Air Force escort platoon, and an Air Force military band.

Major Levenberg was with the Army Air Corps' 17th Pursuit Squadron at Nichols Field in the Philippines when Japan attacked on December 8, 1941. The Field was destroyed on December 10th and the surviving airmen were moved to Bataan to form a provisional infantry. He and all American-Filipino troops on Bataan--estimated to be 85,000--were surrendered on April 9, 1942.

From the funeral

He was one of the small number of Jewish soldiers on the infamous Bataan Death March to Camp O'Donnell. From mid-April until most of the camp was shut down in early June 1942 and the POWs moved to Cabanatuan, thousands died. Levenberg participated in a number of grueling work details outside the camp in the Philippines before he was shipped to Japan to be a slave laborer.

Aboard the hellship Nissyo Maru, via Formosa, he arrived at the Port of Moji early August 1944. There he as taken north to the Nagoya POW Camp #2-B Narumi. This camp provided labor to Nippon Sharyo, where train engines were built and repaired. The same factory that built Engine C5631 that opened the Thai-Burma Death Railway.

Most of the time Levenberg worked in the "kitchen" boiling water for the thin soup to feed the POWs. Two weeks before the end of the war, he was savagely beaten by a guard and fell into a month-long coma. He did not revive until September 3 when he was evacuated to an American hospital ship. At liberation, he weighed 72 pounds and could not walk.

Nippon Sharyo factory still maintains the factory at Narumi where Levenberg toiled and was beaten. The Company is now owned by the rail corporation JR Central. The company is promoted by the Japanese government as wanting to build high-speed rail in the US with proposed projects between Dallas and Houston, and Baltimore and DC. The firm, however, has never apologized to nor acknowledged its American POW slaves. 

Both Nippon Sharyo and JR Central have offices in the United States. Both were alerted to Major Levenberg's funeral. Neither replied nor sent condolences.

Major Levenberg remained in the US Air Force after the war and saw combat in the Korean War. He held numerous world-wide assignments as a security professional in the Strategic Air Command and then as a U.S. civil service member of Naval Air System Command.

In retirement, Levenberg donated his time and energy to support other former POWs at the VA Hospital in Reno, Nevada. He also served on the VA's National Advisory Commission of Former Prisoners of War and as National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC) from 1979 to 1980.

In 1994, he joined, on behalf of ADBC, the group of ex-POWs of the Japanese from other former Allied countries in an appeal to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights regarding these countries' failure in addressing the injustice suffered by POWs of the Japanese during WWII. The appeal was based on the denial of a previous appeal with respect to the "gross violations of human rights" committed by Japan against American POWs during WWII. (Excerpts from the appeal document for UNCHR prepared by Mr. Levenberg) Although their appeal was again denied, it led to the payment by Canada, the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia to their former POWs of the Japanese. The United States is the only country that has not done so.

His oral history was recorded by the Library of Congress and the University of Nevada (“Nothing Had Prepared Me For This Kind of Brutality” p 570). In 1996, Dick Cavett interviewed Levenberg for his HBO series Yesteryear...1942 -- a look at the first year of America's involvement in WWII.

Finally, a funeral for the Rabbi of Cabanatuan

On Friday, June 29, 2018 at Arlington National Cemetery the Kaddish--the Jewish prayer to remember the dead--was finally and officially chanted for Army Corps of Engineers Master Sgt. Aaron Kliatchko, the Rabbi of Cabanatuan.  Although there was no body to occupy his grave, a tombstone now stands to honor him. After the formal military funeral, which included a Rabbi, a Priest, and the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region U.S. Army Military District of Washington Command Chaplain Col. Terry Austin, a reception was held at the National Museum of Jewish Military History in Washington, DC,

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Aaron Kliatchko died on December 31, 1944 aboard the Japanese hellship Brazil Maru as it arrived in Takao Harbor, Formosa from the Philippines bringing the last of the Allied POWs from the Philippines to Japan. His remains have never been accounted for.

Kliatchko was born in 1887 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Minsk, the capital of today’s Belarus. As a teenager he was forced to serve in the Russian Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). He was only 17 when he became a prisoner of war of Imperial Japan.

After the war, he studied to become a Cantor, a singer of Jewish liturgical music. Instead, in 1907, he emigrated to the United States. Finding work in the lower East Side of Manhattan must have been a challenge. Thus, in February 1910, he enlisted in the U.S. Army at the Fort Slocum, New York recruiting depot. He was assigned to the Coastal Artillery Corps and stationed in New London, Connecticut and at Fort Terry, New York. 

During his enlistment and after his discharge in February 1913, Kliatchko studied for and completed an engineering correspondence course. This distinction allowed him to reenlist in the U.S. Army in December 1914 with Army Corps of Engineers. He had become a U.S. citizen in July 1913.

Kliatchko’s records show that he was assigned to the First Battalion, Company C at Washington Barracks, Washington, DC where he became a Corporal in May 1915. The First Battalion became the First Engineers with the U.S. entry into World War I.

It is unclear where he was stationed when the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917. He spoke of being sent to France in June 1917 with the first engineers to join the American Expeditionary Forces. While teaching math to young neighbors on the Philippines, Kliatchko retold many stories of battles in France, including the Battle of Argonne Forest, the final Allied offensive of the War, which ended November 11, 1918. His accounts were so vivid that many may have thought he was there.

There is a record, however, that he was aboard the troop transport USAT Thomas in November 1915 to the Philippine Islands. On December 7, 1917, he was promoted in the Philippines to Sergeant First Class of Company A, 3rd Engineers. This regiment was stationed there to help modernize the fortress island of Corregidor in Manila Bay and the infrastructure of the Philippine Islands, a territory of the United States since 1898.

On October 15, 1918, shortly before the end of WWI, he was promoted to Master Engineer, Junior Grade. Discharged in August 1919, Kliatchko remained in the Philippines where he worked with the then-American construction and engineering company Atlantic Gulf & Pacific Co (today’s AG&P). He was the project engineer for the Angat Dam that supplies water to Metro Manila and irrigation in Bulacan.

Kliatchko retired in the early 1930s to become a gentleman farmer. He married and raised a family of ten. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in December 1941, the former solider, now 55, reportedly volunteered as an American intelligence agent under the codename “K.V.” In March 1942, he left his family and joined American troops fighting the invading Japanese on the Bataan peninsula. There he re-enlisted with the U.S. Army and was designated the rank of Master Sergeant with the Army Corps of Engineers. Some records simply note he was a “surveyor,” to protect his identity.

He was on Bataan when U.S. forces were surrendered on April 9, 1942 and, at 55, for the second time he became a prisoner of Imperial Japan. Kliatchko then survived one of the most infamous war crimes of WWII, the Bataan Death March. He also survived the squalid, makeshift POW Camp O’Donnell where men died at the rate of 300 per day.

In June 1942, after the Japanese released the captured Filipino soldiers, the surviving American POWs were moved to the Cabanatuan Prison Camp. Conditions were better than at O’Donnell, but not by much. Food, clothing, water, and medicine remained scarce. There he remained until December 1944.

According to records, as of June 1943, Cabanatuan had 121 Jewish prisoners. Kliatchko, who had been trained as a Cantor, found a calling to help lead Jewish services and funerals. With his long white beard and impressive bass voice, he soon became known as the “Rabbi of Cabanatuan.” His singing of the Jewish prayers comforted Jew and Gentile alike.

At the camp, the Japanese assigned him to shepherd carabaos (water buffalo) that transported supplies from the town to the POW camp. The task gave him the opportunity to smuggle notes, money, and medicines for his fellow prisoners. Unfortunately, his Japanese captors eventually discovered his courier service and subjected him to months of solitary confinement with reduced rations.

On December 13, 1944, Kliatchko was among more than 1,600 prisoners, mostly officers and medical personnel, who were boarded in the holds of the hellship Oryoku Maru, destined for slave labor in Japan. It was the last hellship from the Philippines to Japan. Barely a day out of Manila, near Subic Bay, American bombers off the carrier USS Hornet sunk the ship. Dodging bullets from Japanese soldiers, the survivors made it to shore. There they were kept a week on an abandoned tennis court exposed to the tropical sun with little water and no food.

Finally moved inland and then to a new dock north of Subic Bay, the men were put aboard two other hellships to continue the voyage north. Kliatchko died from his wounds on December 31, 1944 aboard the Brazil Maru as it arrived in Takeo Harbor, Formosa. 

It is unknown where his body rests. Ordinarily, the Japanese, with no ceremony, would throw the dead into the sea. It is possible, however, his remains are among those buried on shore in Formosa after the American bombing of the Enoura Maru.

These men were disinterred after the war and reburied in graves marked “Unknowns” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. 

Less than 600 of the original shipment prisoners from the Oyroku Maru survived to voyage’s destination of Moji, Japan on January 30, 1945. Many died of wounds and exposure as the days became increasingly cold. At least 100 died the first few days on Japanese soil. Those remaining were soon put on new hellships to Korea and then taken by train to a POW camp at Mukden in northern China. 

Barely 400 of these men survived the war. Some believe the Americans were taken to China not to be slave laborers, but to be hostages. All the senior military officials from surrendered Allied forces were moved to or near Mukden by 1945. There is no extant documentation, however, of this theory.

In 1948, Master Sgt. Kliatchko was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the U.S. can give a civilian.