Correcting history in Congress

Last year, your editor was searching Congress.gov for any legislation that mentioned the Bataan Death March. I found the following celebration of the life of Cpl Walter Gann from Mississippi. Although pleased that another POW received recognition, I was soon shocked at how poorly written the insertion was as well as how full of inaccuracies it was. No one also took the time to check the proper titles for his military awards.

As we are on mission to tell the incredible history of the American POWs of Japan, I contact the author, Congressman Trent Kelly's (R-MS) office, and offered to correct it. I offer the two versions that now appear in the Congressional Record for you to better understand the importance of getting the history right. 

Mr. Gann survived being a POW, but suffered severe PTSD and health issues the rest of his life making permanent employment impossible. By the grace of God and a wonderful family he lived a full life dying in 1980 at 58.

RECOGNIZING THE LIFE OF WALTER GANN 

Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 67

(Extensions of Remarks - April 19, 2021)

RECOGNIZING THE LIFE OF WALTER GANN

 ______ 

 HON. TRENT KELLY of mississippi 

 in the house of representatives 

 Monday, April 19, 2021 

 Mr. KELLY of Mississippi. Madam Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the life and service of Corporal Walter Gann, an American hero and an outstanding representation of the state of Mississippi. Walter Gann was born on January 31, 1922 to John and Mary Rogers Gann. 

He spent the first eighteen years of his life in Calhoun City, Mississippi. Only July 3, 1941 he joined the United States Army Air Forces in Jackson, Mississippi and was soon deployed to the Philippines. At eighteen years old Walter faced attack by the Japanese Imperial Army. After several months of battle with minimal food, supplies, and medical care, the American soldiers were forced to surrender; the Bataan Death March began on April 9, 1942. Corporal Gann, enduring shrapnel wounds and malnutrition, marched 65 miles in the blistering heat. 

 It is believed Corporal Gann arrived at Fukuoka POW Camp No. 1 on Kyushu Island where he faced barbaric treatment from Japanese guards. He was eventually transported to Japan; Gann and his fellow soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder on the Japanese hell ship. Men died by the dozens of suffocation, starvation, and dysentery. In Japan, Corporal Gann was a POW for three and a half years. 

 Corporal Gann was released upon American Victory and was immediately treated in a Washington hospital before returning home. His family rejoiced to see him alive and safe. He was called to testify in the war crime trials following WWII but could not attend because he was hospitalized. For the remainder of his life Corporal Gann bore the weight of all he had witnessed. 

 In 1949 Walter moved to Booneville, Mississippi and married Juanita Goddard. Together they raised four children. In August of 1963 his wife passed, and in November of that year his son was killed in a motorcycle accident. In 1970 he moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee until his death on October 14, 1980. He was laid to rest at Crossroads cemetery in Jumpertown, Mississippi with his wife and son. 

 In the course of his life Corporal Gann was awarded the Good Conduct Medal, a Purple Heart, the WWII Victory Medal, an A.P. Theater Medal with 1 Bronze Star, the American Defense Medal with 1 Bronze Star, and the Philippine Liberation Medal with 1 Bronze Star. He also received a letter from President Harry S. Truman thanking him for his service to the United States. 

 I am grateful for the service of Corporal Walter Gann and admire his commitment to faith, family, and country.

CORRECTED 

RECOGNIZING THE LIFE OF WALTER GANN 

Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 189

(Extensions of Remarks - October 27, 2021)

RECOGNIZING THE LIFE OF WALTER GANN

 ______ 

 HON. TRENT KELLY of mississippi 

 in the house of representatives 

 Wednesday, October 27, 2021 

 Mr. KELLY of Mississippi. Madam Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the life and service of Corporal Walter Gann, an American hero from Mississippi, who defended liberty against impossible odds in the Pacific during World War II. 

 Walter, born in Calhoun City on January 31, 1922, joined the U.S. Army on July 3, 1941. By July 15, he was aboard the USS Coolidge deployed to the Philippines as a member of the Army Signal Corps assigned to 409th Signal Company (Aviation) at Nichols Field outside Manila. The plan was to erect radar towers, but none of the equipment needed arrived on the ship with them. 

 Imperial Japan attacked the Philippines on December 8 and all the critical airfields were destroyed by December 10. Walter's company and the airmen were soon sent on combat duty in the Bataan Peninsula. He was assigned to U.S. Army Forces Far East (USAFFE) headquarters at Little Baguio near the tip of Bataan. 

 The troops on Bataan, running out of ammunition, food, and medicine, with no hope of resupply or reinforcement, were surrendered by their commanding officers on April 9, 1942. Walter was among 86,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war who were forced on what became known as the infamous Bataan Death March, one of World War II's worst war crimes. In the tropical sun, deprived of food, water, and mercy, the men trekked 65 miles up Bataan to a train station. There they were packed standing 100 to a boxcar for the next 24 miles. Men died where they stood. Survivors marched another eight miles to their first POW camp, O'Donnell. 

 Walter, POW No. 203, was shipped to Japan in July 1943 packed in the dark, fetid hold of the hell ship Clyde Maru with 500 other POWs. He was sent to be a slave laborer at Fukuoka No. 17 POW Camp attached to the Mitsui-owned Miike coal mine in southern Japan close to Nagasaki. Starved, beaten, and denied medical care, he was forced to dig coal in a primitive mine until the camp was liberated in September 1945. The coal mine is now a UNESCO Industrial World Heritage site, albeit without mention of the thousands of POWs held there or that the mine had remained reliant on manual labor and not modem machinery. 

Although asked to testify in Japan at the war crime trials held from 1946 to 1948, Mr. Gann could not return because he remained too sick from the various illnesses he suffered from during his three and one- half years as a POW. For the remainder of his life, Walter bore the weight of all the horror and inhumanity he had witnessed. When he was able to work, Walter was a truck driver. 

 In 1949, Walter moved to Booneville, Mississippi, and married Juanita Goddard. Together they raised four children. In 1963, he lost both his wife and his stepson. In his later years, he lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, until he passed away on October 14, 1980. 

 During his lifetime, Walter was awarded the Good Conduct Medal, the Purple Heart, the World War II Victory Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with one bronze campaign star, the American Defense Service Medal with one bronze campaign star, and the Philippine Defense Medal. He also received a letter from President Harry S. Truman thanking him for his service. Posthumously, he received the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious achievement, the Prisoner of War Medal, and the Presidential Unit Citation with two Bronze Oak Leaf Clusters. 

I am grateful for Corporal Walter Gann's commitment to faith, family, and democracy. I am humbled by his sacrifices for our country.

UNESCO and Japan’s Rewriting of History

At UNESCO, Japan lays bare the difficulties of achieving shared values within the Quad.

By Mindy L. Kotler

Originally published in The Diplomat, July 23, 2021
This version is slightly revised for clarity

On July 22nd, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, faced its first test. Unexpectedly, it came at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The focus was on Japan, not China, and the result reveals how fragile the idea of shared, universal values is for this multilateral coalition. As things stand, Japan is a willful outlier.

At the World Heritage Committee’s 44th virtual session, there was a review of several previously designated Japanese World Industrial Heritage sites that were the scene of war crimes in World War II. Americans, Australians, and Indians were among the thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) brought to Japan during the war. They became slave laborers in various private mines, chemical factories, and steel mills, and on docks critical to support Imperial Japan’s war effort.

These very mines, foundries, and wharves were selected by Japan to represent its “Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.” The Japanese, however, left out any mention of this forced labor and abuse, which was the substance of the hundreds of war crimes trials throughout the postwar Pacific.

UNESCO approved the designations in 2015 but conditioned the designations on a promise to provide a “full history” of these sites. Yet, six years later, Japan has not fulfilled this promise. Japan’s forced colonial workers from Korea are given slight mention, although Japan refuses to admit they were unwilling or unhappy. The POWs, which included soldiers, civilians, and mariners from Ireland, Egypt, Norway, Argentina, Jamaica, Portugal, Italy, and Arabia are unmentioned in any official publications, whether at the particular sites or at the Tokyo Industrial Heritage Information Center, which was opened in March 2020.

On July 12, 2021, a UNESCO draft decision noted that Japan still had to improve its interpretive strategy. The reprimand of Japan’s unwillingness to tell the “full history” of these properties was approved July 22. The Committee believes measures are still necessary to “allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others” who were forced or slave laborers. 

Unfortunately, UNESCO identifies POWs only as “others. This euphemism affirms Japan’s effort to censor its war crimes and rewrite the history of World War II. UNESCO members Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Norway, and the Netherlands need to insist that “others” means their veterans.

To satisfy UNESCO’s directive to include “others,” it is implied that Japan must acknowledge that five of the UNESCO industrial heritage sites — Hagi, Kamaishi, Miike, Nagasaki, and Yawata — held 26 POW camps during the war and provided more than 13,000 POW slave laborers from over 16 countries to Japan’s industrial giants, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Nippon Steel.

The Miike Coal Mine (Fukuoka #17) warrants particular attention. The mine, owned by the Mitsui conglomerate, was Japan’s largest. Nearly 2,000 Allied POWs suffered capricious brutality and starvation in deadly and primitive conditions. Hundreds died. American POWs were so desperate for a respite from the coal pits that they traded their meager rice bowls for someone to break their arms or legs.

Kamaishi’s industrial area (Sendai #4B and Sendai #5B) is also illustrative of missing war history. The site was the first to be bombed by U.S. Navy warships off Japan’s unguarded coastline. The iron works at this site, still owned by Nippon Steel, were among Japan’s largest. On July 14, 1945, more than 40 American, Dutch, New Zealand, and British POWs as well as hundreds of Japanese were killed in the bombardment.

Nippon Steel’s Yawata’s steel works (Fukuoka #3) was Japan’s most important armament manufacturer. The workforce was primarily composed of POWs who endured intense manual labor shoveling iron ore and tending the furnaces. Yawata was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud cover from aerial bombing on August 8, 1945, shifted the mission to Nagasaki, close to the Miike Coal Mine.

Japan’s unstated history of Allied slave labor at its UNESCO sites is part of a larger trend of the government’s rewriting history. The narratives presented at Japan’s industrial heritage sites also diminish the use of Korean forced labor and Chinese slave labor. This all dovetails with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s quest to retell Japan’s story in an uncritical, more glorious manner. So important was the UNESCO heritage designation to the former Abe administration that one cabinet adviser had the sole job of shepherding the application through UNESCO.

Highlighting the effort to annul history was last August’s 75th anniversary memorial address for the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, unlike his predecessors, did not mention, “learning from history” or having “remorse.” Instead, he said “we will never forget that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today was built atop the precious sacrifices of the war dead.”

This ahistorical take on Japan’s disastrous war is not a reassurance to UNESCO that Japan will correct the histories of its industrial heritage sites. Nor does it comfort the Quad allies that their shared history will not be recognized and reflected upon. Upholding historical facts is a value of democracy now being undermined by Japan as rapidly as in authoritarian China or Hungary. Japan’s defiance of UNESCO’s recommendations to explain the “full history” of its cultural properties shows how fragile the Quad’s so-called unifying principles are.

Mindy L. Kotler is director and founder of Asia Policy Point, a Washington think tank focused on Northeast Asia. She is also an adviser to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society that represents the American POWs of Japan and their families.

Remembering a POW legend, Ed Jackfert

Ed Jackert with Senator Barbara Boxer

With sadness, I report that on July 24^th, Sgt Edward Jackfert, 98, of Wellsburg, West Virginia and Tampa, Florida passed away. 

 

His funeral was Saturday, August 1, 2020. The West Virginia (WV) Patriot Guard Riders escorted the WWII hero from the Chambers Funeral Home to a public graveside service at Franklin Cemetery, Wellsburg, WV, held with Military Honors by the WV Army National Guard. Ed was with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines where he was surrendered to become a POW of Japan for more than three years. He was liberated in Japan 75 years ago this August. You can leave a note, send flowers or plant a tree HERE.

 

Ed graduated in 1939 from Wellsburg High School and enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps on September 11, 1940. He was sent to aircraft engineers’ school, and then to the Philippine Islands, arriving in June 1941. He was assigned to the 28th Bomb Squadron which later became a part of the 19th Bombardment Group.  The unit was based at Clark Field as the bomber command of the Far East Air Force.

 

Ed was a mechanic at Clark Field when Imperial Japanese Navy planes attacked on December 8, 1941. The airfield was destroyed in less than an hour. Clark Field as a tactical base was virtually destroyed. The casualties were very high, about 100 wounded and 55 dead. Survivors were evacuated on December 24^th to the Bataan Peninsula and Mindanao island.

 

Ed fought as part of a provisional infantry formed on Mindanao. First, he was assigned to guard Carmen Ferry near Davao and the newly constructed Del Monte Air Field. In mid-April 1942, he was sent to the new Maramag Field in central Mindanao to help put up a last-ditch offense, known as the Royce Mission. Mindanao was surrendered to the Japanese on May 10^th. (Mother’s Day 1942. The POWs captured on Mindanao were consolidated at Camp Casisang, about five kilometers southwest of Malaybalay, Mindanao. They were miles away from Bataan and the infamous Bataan Death March.

 

On October 3, 1942, he and 268 POWs at Camp Casisang were transported by the hellship Tamohoko Maru from Bugu, Mindanao to Manila.  They were loaded aboard the hellship Tottori Maru for a month-long trip via Formosa (Taiwan) and Chosen (Korea) to Japan arriving November 11, 1942.

 

In October 1942, he was transported to Japan aboard the hellship Tottori Mari arriving November 11, 1942. He was primarily a slave laborer at Tokyo-2B-Kawasaki POW Camp (Mitsui Wharf Co., Ltd. known as “Mitsui Madhouse” for its brutal and chaotic conditions as well the language problems created by the many nationalities at the camp). There he was used as stevedore and day laborer for the Mitsui Senpaku KK [today’s Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd], Mitsubishi’s NYK Line (name unchanged today), Nisshin Flour (today’s Nisshin Seifu Group), Kawasaki Railroad Electric Power Plant, KYK Brick Factory (Kojima or Kawasaki Yogyo Co., Ltd., today’s Shinagawa Refactory), and Nippon Steel (name unchanged today). He was also traded around the Kawasaki, Kanagawa area spending time as a slave laborer for Nisshin Flour Milling (Tokyo 24-D), Showa Denko Chemical (Tokyo-16-B- Niigata [Kanose] today’s Showa Denko K.K.) where he mixed chemicals for ammunition, and Japan Steel Pipe [Japan Kokan, today’s JFE Holdings] (Tokyo 5D Kawasaki). Starting in January 1945, the camps came under constant air attack from American bombing raids. On July 25, 1945, Tokyo-2B was destroyed and 22 POWs were killed.

 

The camp was liberated on August 30, 1945. Among the 139 POWs in the camp, there were 59 Americans, 25 British, 6 Australians, 44 Italians and 5 Norwegians. He was evacuated to the hospital ship USS Benevolence (AH-13) for processing and then eventually on to a plane to Manila. There, on September 18, they boarded a troop transport and arrived in Los Angeles [possibly] on October 3.

 

Ed returned home to West Virginia to heal and reconstitute his life. He went to Bethany College and received a degree in economics. From there he joined the Internal Revenue Service as a Criminal Investigator and worked primarily in the field of organized crime and corruption of public officials. He retired from the government in February 1977.

 

Ed was a valiant and tireless advocate for the American POWs of Japan. He was one of five POWs who testified in person on June 28, 2000 to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on how the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan abrogated the right of former POWs of Japan to sue Japanese companies for compensation for their forced labor or on how the POWs were mistreated by their Japanese capturers in violation of the Geneva Convention.

 

In September 2010, he participated in the first delegation of American POWs on a “friendship” trip to Japan. There he met with Japan’s Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada who offered an official apology to the POWs of Japan. This apology appeared as a Cabinet Decision in February 2009 making it one of only four official Japanese government apologies.

 

He was twice elected National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC, today the ADBC Memorial Society), in 1984 and 1999. His passion has been to ensure the legacy of the POWs by creating the ADBC Museum, Education & Research Center in Wellsburg, WV to preserve the history of the defense of the Philippines and to teach the lessons of war. 

The Museum received in 2015 the only atonement payment from a Japanese company, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, for the company’s wartime abuse of POW slave laborers in its mines. You have to dig deep into the company's 2016 social responsibility report on page 70 to find mention of the apology on the Mitsubishi Materials website. There is one sentence. It mentions an "apology made to former US prisoners who were forced to work." In other words, the apology is not "offered" as reconciliation experts suggest; non-US POWs are not included (British, Australian, South African, Irish); and the rightwing euphemism "forced to work" is used. 

Ed wrote a memoir of his time as a POW called, Service to my Country. 

POW#246

 

Requiescat in pace

POW Descendants undertake trip of reconciliation and healing

Hellship Hokusen Maru

On October 7, 2018, seven descendants of American POWs of Japan who were surrendered on the Philippines in April and May 1942, left for a week in Japan as guests of the Japanese government. Below is the ADBC-MS press release and a link to full biographies of the POWs represented. We wish them well.

Seven children and descendants of POWs are visiting Japan this week as guests of the Japanese government. They are the 10th delegation of the U.S.-Japan POW Friendship Program to promote reconciliation and remembrance between the two countries. This program began in 2010.

The families represent five American POWs of Japan who were members of the U.S. Army, U.S. Coast Artillery Corps, and U.S. Army Air Corps. Japan attacked the Philippines and other American Pacific territories hours after their surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. All the men fought to defend the Philippines against invading Japanese forces and all endured years of brutal captivity. Four survived the Bataan Death March, four were slave laborers for Japanese companies, and one perished in the bombing of the “hellship” Enoura Maru in Takao Harbor, Formosa.

The delegation is composed of:

LINDA, 70, and DAVE ANDERSON, 70, of El Paso, Texas are the daughter and son-in-law of the late Clarence Delbert Neighbors, a Private with the U.S. Army Air Corps, 20th Air Base Group, 28th Materiel Squadron at Nichols Field. He survived the Bataan Death March, work details on the Philippines, a hellship to Manchuria, slave labor for Mitsubishi at Mukden, and slave labor for Mitsui at their lead mine in Kamioka.

CAROLYN BUNCH DIAZ, 82, of Santa Ana, California and CATHY MATZEK, 55, are the daughter and granddaughter of the late Wilbur J. Bunch, who was a Master Sergeant with the U.S. Army, 54th Signal Maintenance Company (Aviation) stationed at Ft. Stotsenburg. He survived the Bataan Death March, work details at the Cabanatuan POW Camp, and the sinking of the hellship Oryoku Maru. He died January 9, 1945 from the bombing of the hellship Enoura Maru in Takao Harbor, Formosa.

ANNA KEEVER LYON, 69, of Greensboro North Carolina is the daughter of the late Joe W. Keever, a Staff Sergeant with 60th Coast Artillery Corps of the U.S. Army stationed on Corregidor. He survived imprisonment on Corregidor and at Cabanatuan as well as a hellship to Manchuria to be a slave laborer for Mitsubishi at Mukden.

DAVID A. TOPPING, JR, 65, of Chestertown, Maryland, is the son of the late David A. Topping, a Private with the 27th Bomb Group (Light), 91st Bomb Squadron. He survived the Bataan Death March, work details on the Philippines, hellships to Japan, and slave labor for Kawasaki Steel in Maibara.

JAMES WRIGHT, 82, of Madison, Alabama is the son of the late William R. Wright, a Tech Sergeant with the 24th Pursuit Group, 17th Pursuit Squadron. He survived the Bataan Death March, work details on the Philippines, a hellship to Japan and slave labor for Meiji Mining in Keisen.

Full profiles of the POWs can be found HERE

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

This is the 10th 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, applauded the inclusion of POW children and grandchildren in the program.

Ms. Thompson said, “It confirms Japan’s commitment to overcoming its dark history and shows their modern understanding that the traumas of past atrocities and war crimes are intergenerational and enduring. The goodwill and healing resulting from these trips are a model for more Japanese efforts to acknowledge and console Imperial Japan’s wartime victims. The result strengthens the personal ties that undergird the U.S.-Japan Alliance.”

Another California POW passes

POW Memorial at
Miramar 

Services are scheduled for Robert J. Vogler, Jr., 97, of Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, on June 20, 2018 at 11:00am at Miramar National Cemetery.

He led the second POW visitation program to Japan in 2011 and visited the Mitsui mine where he was liberated.

He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in January 1940 at the age of 19. Stationed in Manila as part of the 24th Pursuit Group 17th Pursuit Squadron, he completed aircraft instrument training and attended the University of Philippines to study engineering. He serviced aircraft unitl the invading Japanese destroyed the planes and air fields in the December 1942. He was then assigned to the infantry wehre fought on Bataan. 

As a POW, he survived the Bataan Death March, Camp O'Donnell, and Cabanatuan in the Philippines. He was shipped to Mukden, China (today's Shenyang) in October 1942 aboard Mitsubishi's hellship Tottori Maru via Korea to Manchuria. Vogler was a slave laborer at MKK factory (Manshu Kosaku Kikai, which some researchers believe was owned by Mitsubishi and known as Manchuria Mitsubishi Machine Tool Company, Ltd.), working as a grinding specialist. He believes that the multiple shots and rectal probes that he received while at Mukden were human medical experiments conducted by the Imperial Army's 731st Biological Warfare Unit. 

In May 1944, he and 150 American "difficult" POWs were transferred to Nagoya-1B-Kamioka, Japan as punishment for bad behavior to be slave laborers for Mitsui Mining (now Kamioka Kogyo, a 100% subsidiary of Mitsui Mining & Smelting Co., Ltd.) mining lead and zinc. Mitsui now operates a recycling center at the former POW camp site. The mine was also the source of one of Japan's four major cases of mass industrial poisoning in the 1960s. 

After the war, he remained in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 1960. He was then employed by General Dynamics as a manufacturing and development engineer, but was forced to retire in 1976 due to health issues caused by his POW experience. In 2000, Mr. Volger and his wife returned to Kamioka to a warm welcome from mine representatives, town officials, citizens, and school children. He said that the visit brought him to tears and helped rest the many demons that haunted him from his maltreatment in Japan's POW camps.
POW#138 and #0336

Robert Vogler Jr., Bataan Death March survivor who made peace with the Japanese, dies at 97

San Diego Union-Tribune, June 8, 2018


Robert Vogler Jr. liked to eat. Nobody blamed him.

Mr. Vogler had survived the Bataan Death March, one of World War II’s signature horrors, and spent more than three years in Japanese prison camps. When the war ended in 1945 and he was freed, his weight had dropped from 210 pounds to 80.

So he was hungry. And not just for food.

Mr. Vogler, who died June 1 at age 97 at his home in Rancho Bernardo, was also hungry for peace. He had nightmares about his war experiences, and while he never wanted to forget what happened, he hoped to learn how to forgive.

He and his wife invited a Japanese girl into their home for several weeks as a foreign-exchange student. He tracked down a Japanese prison guard he credited with saving his life, and eventually traveled to Japan to visit the man’s family. He returned to the lead mine where he’d been forced to work during the war.

“I feel a lot better now,” he told the Union-Tribune in June 1997, shortly after returning from Japan. “I think I left a little of the garbage back there.”

His family noticed a change. “I used to tease him,” said his wife, Berni. “I told him: ‘Your stone heart has been softened.’”

Mr. Vogler was born May 1, 1921, in Seattle. His father, Robert Sr., worked for the electric company, and his mother, Faith, was a homemaker. At age 19, he enlisted in what was known as the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) and was sent to the Philippines, where he worked on airplanes as an instrument specialist.

After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, they invaded the Philippines. Allied forces — about 10,000 Americans and 60,000 Filipinos — retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and fought for more than three months before they ran out of food and ammunition and were ordered by their commander to surrender.

The captives were forced to march in 100-degree heat for about a week with almost no water or food. Those who stopped walking or complained were stabbed with bayonets, shot or beheaded. By the time the march ended some 70 miles later at a prison camp, thousands had died.

Mr. Vogler was then packed with other prisoners into the hold of a “hell ship” and sent to Manchuria, where they were put to work in a Mitsubishi factory making parts for the Japanese war machine. Covertly, he and the others built defects into the parts.

When the Japanese figured out the sabotage, they scattered the captives to other camps. Mr. Vogler wound up at a lead mine near Kamioka, a mountain village. There, he befriended a guard, Masao Okada, who would occasionally slip him extra food and cigarettes and intervene to shorten beatings.

After the war, Mr. Vogler stayed in the Air Force as a supply sergeant and served at bases in the United States and abroad for 20 years. He then moved to San Diego and worked at General Dynamics for about 15 years.

In retirement, he enjoyed tinkering with anything electrical, gardening, square-dancing, reading Westerns — and eating. “He’d been nearly starved to death so he made up for it,” said Julie Sutton, his stepdaughter.

At night, in bed, just before he turned off the lights, he would often ask his wife, “What are we having for dinner tomorrow?”

Through letters, Mr. Vogler stayed in touch with Okada. A couple of times he tried to go visit him in Japan, but found it too hard emotionally. By the time he was finally ready, the guard had died.

He went anyway, with his wife, in May 1997. They met government officials and visited a school, where Mr. Vogler read a short speech he had prepared:

“I come to Kamioka a free man — as one who came to remember that other man who showed me that humanity can still exist despite opposing sides and different cultures. He recognized that I, too, was an individual of worth and not some faceless vile creature. He treated me with a degree of respect that I have never forgotten.”

The Voglers traveled to Okada’s home and met his widow and three sons. Mr. Vogler was given a gift: One of the late guard’s kimonos. He put it on, went over to a shrine set up near the living room, and bowed.

“That was a moment,” he told the Union-Tribune later. “I let them know that when I am gone, the robe will return to the family.”

His wife said she will keep that promise.

Among his other survivors are two stepchildren, Kyle Andrews (Pam) of Englewood, Fla., and Julie Sutton (Jim) of Lakeside; seven grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.

Bataan Death March survivor will be missed by his Japanese friends

Tokudome and Tenney

Champion for the American POWs of Japan
By Kinue Tokudome, founder and director of US-Japan Dialogue on POWs
Fox News Opinion, April 7, 2017

Dr. Lester Tenney, a Bataan Death March survivor, and I exchanged thousands of emails since we first met in 1999. Initially, I became interested in his POW experience as a Japanese journalist. But it did not take long before I found myself working with him to bring an honorable closure to the history of American POWs of the Japanese. Our emails were always upbeat, discussing what more we could do together.

But in late January, Lester sent me an email that was uncharacteristic of him:

I am on my last trip, travel to a new world. So nice having you as a friend. If I am still alive I will be speaking in front of 200 people on January 27th how forgiveness works wonders. If you could come, it would be the culmination of many good years together.

How could I refuse such a request? So I flew from Japan and joined Lester in Carlsbad, Calif. as he spoke to a local audience.

Towards the end of his speech, Lester called me onto the stage and had me read from a letter he had just received from Mitsubishi Materials. It was a report on memorial plaques that the company had placed last November at four mines where its predecessor enslaved American POWs during WWII. Lester wanted me to read the inscription to the audience. After stating how many American POWs were forced to work and how many died at each mine, the inscription ended with following sentence.

Reflecting on these tragic past events with the deepest sense of remorse, Mitsubishi Materials offers its heartfelt apologies to all former POWs who were forced to work under appalling conditions in the mines of the former Mitsubishi Mining Company, and reaffirms its unswerving resolve to contribute to the creation of a world in which fundamental human rights and justice are fully guaranteed.

Lester had already received an apology from the Japanese government for the inhumane treatment American POWs were subjected to. In 2010, the Japanese Foreign Ministry started a reconciliation program in which it invited former POWs and their families to Japan. They all became possible because of Lester’s tenacity in seeking them. I had the privilege of helping him as he faced many obstacles along the way.

What Mitsubishi Materials wrote on their plaques was what Lester wanted the most and what took him the longest to obtain. It was not from Mitsui Mining that enslaved him, but as a longtime leader of former POWs he was genuinely pleased with Mitsubishi Materials’ sincerity.

As we parted, I said to Lester, “Let’s work harder so we will get apologies from other companies.” That was the last time I saw him. I would go back to Carlsbad to attend the memorial service for Lester a month later.

Lester was among some 27,000 American soldiers who became POWs after the largest surrender in the US military history that took place in the Philippines in the spring of 1942.

Forty percent of them would die while in captivity. Those who were surrendered on April 9, including Lester, were forced to walk what became known as the Bataan Death March. Lester was later sent to Japan and became a forced laborer in Mitsui coalmine.

Of some 12,000 American POWs who were sent to Japan to work for Japanese companies 1,115 died due to harsh working conditions, abuse, diseases and malnutrition. In addition to Mitsui Mine and Mitsubishi Mining, they included internationally known companies like Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Nippon Express and Nippon Sharyo (now owned by JR Central).

Lester was determined not to let the world forget this tragic chapter of the Pacific War, although he had long forgiven the Japanese. His lawsuit against Mitsui was dismissed as the U.S. court found that POWs’ claims had been waived by the 1951 Peace Treaty.

But since money was not his goal, he did not stop. In fact, it was through his quest for justice and reconciliation that Lester made many Japanese friends. I witnessed Lester and his wife Betty develop a beautiful friendship with Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Ichiro Fujisaki and Mrs. Fujisaki. He dearly loved the Japanese exchange student who stayed at his home. He spoke to thousands of Japanese young people and enjoyed every opportunity to do so. His memoir was translated into Japanese by a group of English teachers in Japan who listened to his speech and were touched by his humanity.

The only thing I regret was that Lester did not receive much support from his own government. Having read the Mitsubishi Materials’ inscription and realized its significance, I asked the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo if Ambassador (Caroline) Kennedy could attend the unveiling ceremony. After all, there was not a single memorial built by the Japanese government for the American POWs who died in Japan.

But the Embassy told me that not only could Ambassador Kennedy not attend but also it could not send anyone to represent the U.S. government.

It was widely reported that Ambassador Kennedy worked very hard to pave the way for President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima.

Candidate Obama compared his campaign to the Bataan Death March and never apologized. This could have been the opportunity for the Obama administration to pay respect to POWs. And it would have encouraged other companies to come forward.

Shortly before his passing, Lester read a piece in the Washington Post that praised Ambassador Kennedy for her effort for reconciliation. He sent a letter to the paper writing in part:

As the last Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a recognized military organization of former POWs of the Japanese during WWII, I myself as well as our members have been working for reconciliation for many years.

I wish Ambassador Kennedy had supported our effort in seeking reconciliation with those Japanese companies that enslaved us. Most of the companies have not acknowledged their involvement in POW forced labor, much less apologized. So far only one company, Mitsubishi Materials, has come forward and apologized to the American POWs.

I was pleased that Ambassador Kennedy visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and paid respect to the victims of the end of this tragic war. I wish Ms. Kennedy had also paid tribute to those American POWs who died in Japan as forced laborers.

The letter was never published. But Lester would not live his life with bitterness. In our last exchange ten days before his passing we wrote to each other:

As you did so many times when you faced adversities in your life, I am confident that you two remain positive and live in the present and enjoy everything. Love, Kinue

You are right… just another hurdle in my life of living. I must realize I am 96 years old, and that is already way beyond the most. It is the unknown that gets me. Love, Lester

Dr. Lester Tenney will be missed by many Japanese friends he made.

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.”

  

###

Congressional Testimony on slave labor used by Japanese high speed rail companies

Statement for the Record

to the 

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Subcommittee on Transportation and Public Assets

Hearing on

LAGGING BEHIND: THE STATE OF HIGH SPEED RAIL IN THE UNITED STATES

By

Ms. Jan Thompson

President, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor-Memorial Society

14 July 2016

Japanese Corporate Use of U.S. POWs as Slave Labor

Chairman Mica and Ranking Member Duckworth, I speak to you on behalf of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor-Memorial Society, the successor organization to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC), founded in 1946. We represent the surviving prisoners of war of Japan, their families, researchers and historians. Our goal is to preserve the history of the American POW experience in the Pacific and to communicate its enduring spirit and inspiration to future generations

Although I cannot address the delays in contracting and construction of High Speed Rail (HSR) in the United States, I would like to call your and the Committee’s attention to the delay by Japanese HSR companies in acknowledging and addressing their wartime use of American POWs as slave labor. The failure of these companies to do so is an affront to the Americans who must fund the purchase of Japanese HSR technologies in our country and to the memory of our World War II veterans who fought tyranny. It also ignores the Charter of Corporate Behavior set by Keidanren, Japan’s major business organization, that asks its members to conduct their business with a “strong sense of ethical values,” “respect [for] human rights and other international norms of behavior,” and “socially responsible behavior within their supply chain.”

Many of the Japanese companies that intend to bid on High-Speed Rail contracts in the United States profited from their wartime use of American and Allied POW slave labor in the most brutal of conditions. And, like France’s HSR company SNCF, the two Japanese consortia bidding for HSR contracts in the United States, JR East and JR Central are the successor companies to state-owned rail lines that transported American and Allied POWs to slavery, torture, and death.

These companies, unlike those in Germany, Austria, and France, have never made amends for – or even acknowledged – their role in the gross violations of human rights and breach of the Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs.

We are concerned that taxpayer dollars may go to Japanese corporations that still do not respect American veterans and are unwilling to take responsibility for violations of international law and human rights.

Among the POWs enslaved to support Japanese companies was, Chairman Mica, one of your late constituents, Sgt Sam Moody. We deeply appreciate that you have urged several Congresses to enact legislation in his name: the “Samuel B. Moody Bataan Death March Compensation Act.” We also understand that you honor Sgt Moody daily by giving visiting veterans a copy of his memoir Reprieve from Hell with a forward by you. Sgt Moody was tortured at a camp operated by one of today’s key participants in Japan’s HSR consortia—Nippon Sharyo. This company made and still makes Japan’s rail cars. It is also famous for having built the engines used on the Thai-Burma Death Railway.

Sgt Moody, who survived the Bataan Death March and a “Hell Ship” to Japan was caught stealing a cup of sugar. As punishment, he was made to stand at attention in the Nippon Sharyo camp yard. The 24-year old Massachusetts native remained there for a record-setting 53 hours. The camp reportedly held 273 men of whom 189 were American with the rest being British, Canadian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Jamaican, and Finish.

The use of POWs to support Japanese industry during the War was not an isolated event, but was by government design. Imperial Japan’s Ministry of Munitions under Nobusuke Kishi in coordination with the War Ministry headed by General Hideki Tojo created a broad government program to supply over 60 private Japanese corporations with POW labor. These companies requested, paid the government for, and effectively enslaved POWs in order to maintain wartime industrial production.

In Japan, some 32,000 Allied POWs endured abuses at the hands of the employees of these companies that were comparable to, and sometimes worse than, those inflicted upon them by the Japanese military. As a result, more than a 1,000 American POWs (over 3,500 Allied POWs) died on the main islands of Japan alone. Of those who survived, many suffered permanent physical or psychological damage.

Nearly all of the Japanese companies that want to bring High-Speed Rail to California, the Baltimore-Washington Corridor, and Texas used POW slave labor. In their corporate histories they boast over 100 years of continuous operation spanning three centuries. Most retain their original names. Many utilized labor from multiple POW camps for their mines, factories, foundries, and docks. Some of the camps were in Japan’s occupied territories. Current research finds the number of POW camps associated with Japanese companies bidding on HSR contracts as follows: Mitsui-9; Hitachi-7, Nippon Steel (Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal)-6, Mitsubishi-5, Sumitomo-5, Kawasaki-2, Nippon Sharyo-2, and Toshiba-1.

Only one of the Mitsubishi Group’s companies, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation (MMC), and only last year, has acknowledged its involvement in POW forced labor and maltreatment. This is in stark contrast to German (Siemens) and French (SNCF) bidders for the High-Speed Rail projects, both of which have not only apologized for their war crimes during WWII but also committed themselves to supporting extensive projects of remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation.

JR East and JR Central manage the two Japanese HSR consortia. Both have their own histories of involvement with slave labor as both were part of the Japan’s national railway. The rails of JR East transported prisoners to 46 POW camps including the infamous Ofuna Interrogation Center where American Naval officers, such as Olympian Louis Zamperini, were routinely tortured. And the rails of JR Central transported prisoners to 12 POW camps, including the ones supplying slave laborers to Nippon Sharyo. JR Central now owns this company.

In 2009, the Government of Japan finally offered its apology and established a visitation program (modeled on a longstanding Japanese program for POWs of other allied nations) for American former prisoners of war of Imperial Japan. Since 2010, there have been seven trips to Japan for 43 former POWs, all in their late 80s or 90s, and three widows and two descendants.

On July 19, 2015, MMC became the first Japanese company to officially apologize to American POWs who were used as slave laborers to maintain war production. The historic apology was to those who were forced to work in four mines operated by Mitsubishi Mining, Inc., the predecessor company of MMC. This apology was followed by a $50,000 one-time donation to a museum in the United States.

It is time for all Japan’s private companies that plan to bid on American HSR projects to follow their government’s lead, as well as that of MMC, SNCF, and Siemens, and offer their own programs of reconciliation. That the transportation of POWs to “death-by-work” camps and widespread forced labor constitute war crimes is self-evident. Yet, the Japanese companies have been allowed to delay their responsibility to the American people and to justice.

It is our hope that the U.S. Congress will consider among the “delays” that have to be addressed in bringing HSR to the U.S. is Japanese corporate commitment to fostering respect for the life histories of those who they enslaved and abused. We would welcome an opportunity to share our thoughts on how this can be accomplished.

The ordeal of the American POWs of Japan is not just another facet of war history. Nor is it simply another saga of WWII suffering. It is a history of resilience, survival, and the human spirit, good and bad. And it has become an example of a path toward mutual understanding and justice between Japan and its former victims.

Ms. Jan Thompson
President
American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor Memorial Society
Daughter of PhM2c Robert E. Thompson USN, Bilibid, Fukuoka 3B, & Mukden, POW# 2011

Later: The Committee Staff accepted the testimony and considered it part of the record. However, it was not included in the written report nor on the hearing website. None of the testimonies for the record were.

Obama must memorialize more than Hiroshima

memorial to American POWs
who died in Hiroshima

On May 27th, U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will together visit together the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

There has been much commentary on this, most to create a climate of acceptance of this historic visit. Few give the perspective of the American POW. Many assume it will be negative. This is not necessarily true.

Below is an op ed that appeared on May 11th in The Wall Street Journal Online by Dr. Lester Tenney. He tries to give some nuance to how a Pacific War veteran may view the visit.

For the POWs, who have so often have been abandoned by the White House, this is an opportunity to insist that they must be remembered.

To this end, a memorial needs to be erected at the Port of Moji on Kyushu that is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site; Japan’s new UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites must note that American and Allied POWs were slave laborers at these sites; and that the POW visitation program must be turned into a permanent program of remembrance, reconciliation, and education.

On May 12th, National Security Advisor Susan Rice held a meeting with veterans organizations to review the President’s upcoming trip to Vietnam and Japan. The American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society was not invited. Rice said the President’s decision to visit Hiroshima, Japan was “to honor the memory of all who lost their lives during World War II.” We shall see.

Remembering More Than Hiroshima
We must not forget the lives lost and trauma incurred by Allied forces during the Pacific War.
By LESTER TENNEY
Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2016 12:15 p.m. ET

A black man was the first American soldier to die in World War II. An unexploded bomb from a Mitsubishi “Betty” split U.S. Army Pvt. Robert Brooks in two on December 8, 1941, as he ran to the machine gun on his half-track at Clark Field in the Philippines. Like me, he was a member of the 192nd Tank Battalion preparing to fight the invading Imperial Japanese forces. It is fitting that our first black president will soon stand at Hiroshima, where the Pacific War began its end.

Pvt. Brooks’s sacrifice and those of thousands of American and Allied forces who fought and died for freedom in the Pacific must never be forgotten. What Hiroshima represents is more than the effects of a nuclear weapon. It is the culmination of a war started by Imperial Japan and conducted with gross inhumanity, a war in which more civilians died than combatants.

It would be wrong for the president to pivot away from this history and use his visit solely to discuss aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons. Hiroshima highlights mankind’s tragic ability to wreak terrible destruction, and this destruction was not caused exclusively by atomic bombs. Sand-filled bamboo sticks, bayonets, plague-inflected fleas, starvation and rape—methods of warfare used by Japan—are also destructive.

When President Harry Truman announced the bombing of Nagasaki, which ended the war, he recognized “the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.” However, he went on to explain “we have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved, beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”

As a former American POW of Japan, I am particularly sensitive to these words. Truman was looking out for me and more than 27,000 other American POWs in Asia. Until then, we felt forgotten and ignored. The “Europe first” policy of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill abandoned us to fight without resupply or reinforcement on the Philippines at the start of World War II. We became POWs for more than three bitter years.

We endured four unforgiving months of tank warfare in the tropical heat on Bataan against an enemy with superior training, equipment and provisions. Surrendered by our commanders, nearly 80,000 of us American and Filipino troops were forced on the Bataan Death March. The surviving 68,000 arrived at Camp O’Donnell, a prison camp that saw up to 300 die daily.
The camp commandant ranted at us that we were lower than dogs and better off dead, as we would always be enemies of Japan. I must say that many times I had to agree.

After a period in the camp, many of us went by “hell ship” to Japan to become slave laborers. In my case, it was in a dilapidated Mitsui coal mine. My friend from Janesville, Wis., Capt. Fred Bruni, had a different experience. He and 150 men from the camp were sent to Palawan Island to build an airfield. Upon completion, all the men were set afire and machine-gunned by the Kempeitai.

We POWs have tried to preserve this history despite U.S. and Japanese government efforts to suppress it. Upon liberation, most of us were forced to sign gag orders not to discuss the horrors of our imprisonment. The U.S. government’s policy was to pacify Japan in part by curbing memories of its war atrocities. Central to the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty is an article foreclosing any further compensation of victims, thus again preventing the recall of Imperial Japan’s past crimes and abuses.

At home, an underfunded Veterans Administration refused to give us full disability and ignored or misunderstood the aftereffects of vitamin deficiency, tropical diseases and trauma. It took two acts of Congress before we received any compensation for our imprisonment and only at a rate of $1.50 per day for lost meals.

The U.S. government abandoned the Pacific War’s history. This has made efforts to hold Japanese companies accountable for their brutal use of POW slaves nearly impossible. It is taboo to associate high-speed rails, luxury automobiles or Washington’s metro cars with companies that once abused Americans. Among the nearly 60 well-known companies such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Kawasaki and Nippon Sharyo, only the Mitsubishi Materials Company, which used POWs in four of its mines, has apologized.

In recent years the Japanese government has finally begun to make amends to American POWs. They offered an official apology in 2009. At the Obama administration’s urging, they established in 2010 a reconciliation program for former POWs to visit Japan. Unfortunately the program will end this year without any follow-up for descendants or the public.

But history is critical to how we understand ourselves. No one knew Pvt. Brooks’s race until the Army wanted to honor him. When news of his death reached Fort Knox, the chief of the armored force, Gen. Jacob Devers, decided that a parade ground should be named in his memory, because the first American tanker to die in World War II should not be forgotten.

When it was discovered that Pvt. Brooks’s parents were black tenant farmers from Sadieville, Ky., the general was asked if he wanted to reconsider. “No,” he answered, “it did not matter whether or not Robert was black, what mattered was that he had given his life for his country.” As Gen. Devers said at the Brooks Field dedication ceremony, “In death there is no grade or rank. And in this greatest democracy the world has ever known, neither riches nor poverty, neither creed nor race, draws a line of demarcation in this hour of national crisis.”

Mr. Obama wants to use his visit to Hiroshima to highlight the perils of nuclear war. But this is not the only lesson. Our service as veterans of the Pacific War needs to be remembered and not abandoned to some tumid oratory. The president’s visit to Hiroshima will be hollow, a gesture without motion, if the Pacific War’s full history is not maintained. Hiroshima does not and cannot exist outside the context of the Asia-Pacific War and all its dead.

Mr. Tenney, 95, was a member of the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company B that defended the Philippines in World War II. He lives in San Diego.

Mr. President a visit to Hiroshima cannot be outside the context of the Pacific War

Secretary of State Kerry bows at Hiroshima, April 11, 2016

On April 19, 2016, Lester Tenney, Past National Commander, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor wrote President Barack Obama the following letter:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We met at your annual Veterans’ Day breakfast last year. I was the former POW of Japan who gave you my book describing how I survived the Battle of Bataan, the Bataan Death March, a “hell ship” to Japan, and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.

Whereas I encourage a visit to Hiroshima, I do object to any visit that does not first acknowledge the American and Allied forces that fought and died for freedom in the Pacific. To focus solely on the effects of a nuclear weapon removes all responsibility from Imperial Japan for starting the war and conducting it with gross inhumanity.

American POWs of Japan are particularly sensitive to being left behind and ignored when presidents pursue big policies. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill’s “Europe First” policy abandoned us to fight without resupply or reinforcement on the Philippines at the start of World War II. Isolated, sick, and without ammunition, food, or medicine, we had no choice but to be surrendered and become prisoners of Japan for over three years

Upon liberation most of us were forced to sign gag orders not to discuss the horrors of our imprisonment. The policy was to pacify Japan by erasing its history of atrocities. At home, the VA refused to give us full disability and ignored or misunderstood the aftereffects of vitamin deficiency, tropic disease, and trauma. It took two acts of Congress before we received any compensation and only at a rate of $1.50/day for lost meals.

In 1995, we sued the Japanese companies that used us as slaves. We were thwarted in court by the U.S. State Department siding with the Japanese. The Peace Treaty with Japan, written when Japan was believed destitute, was designed to preclude further war claims. The young lawyer in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser who worked on the brief was even given an award for his successful efforts against us veterans.

In Congress, the U.S. Defense Department, State Department, and a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by Japanese companies and government joined to stop legislation that would allow the POWs to sue Japanese companies or to have the U.S. government provide ex gratia compensation as all other Allied governments and Norway had to their POWs of Japan.

Efforts to compel Japanese companies to apologize and to give atonement payments for their brutal slave labor have produced very little. Among the nearly 60 well-known companies such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, and Nippon Sharyo, only Mitsubishi Materials Company, that used POWs in four of its mines during the War, has come forward to apologize. Last year they held a ceremony in Los Angeles and donated $50,000 to a museum. No other company has followed.

Yes, over the past decade the Japanese government has worked to make amends to the American POWs. They offered an official apology in 2009. With your urging, they established in 2010 a reconciliation program for former POWs to visit Japan. However, the help of your Administration seems to have stopped there.

Port of Moji, Kyushu

Mr. President, I do not want you to add to the sorry tale of abandonment of the American POWs of Japan. I urge you to ensure that the history of the war in the Pacific is fully remembered and memorialized. Most of all I want you to understand that Hiroshima does not and cannot exist outside the context of the Asia Pacific War and all its dead.

Thus, I urge you to include in your visit to Japan with a visit to the American section of the Commonwealth Cemetery in Tokyo. Then you should go to the port of Moji on Kyushu to break ground for a memorial to the American and Allied POWs carried to Japan aboard “hell ships.” At Hiroshima, please include a stop at the memorial plaque to the 12 POWs killed near the hypocenter.

I also urge you Mr. President to ask Prime Minister Shinzo Abe two things: 1) to make permanent the reconciliation visitation program so that descendants and historians can be included and expand it into a joint educational program; and 2) to urge those companies that used POW slave labor to emulate their government’s honorable gesture of acknowledging their inhumane treatment of American POWs and apologizing for it.

At 95, I have witnessed the worst and the best of Japan. What I suggest can help you advance our important relationship with Japan by bringing an honorable closure and healing to its darkest history.

I wish you a very successful and fruitful trip to Japan.

Sincerely yours,

Lester Tenney

Past National Commander, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor

Japan’s War Legacy

Baron Mitsui dines with POW officers

The postwar generation may now be the majority in Japan, but they too must know the atrocities of war.

By LESTER TENNEY
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 1, 2015

Imperial Japan became history on Sept. 2, 1945. Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II. For me, nearly 600 miles south in a prisoner of war camp outside Nagasaki, unaware of these historic events, I simply remember the pure joy of liberation.

What was V-J Day like for POWs? For those of us in Fukuoka No. 17-B POW Camp, the war ended on Aug. 15, when our Mitsui company overseers, without explanation, stopped sending us down into their coal mine. We were returned to camp for an unusual midday meal of limitless rice and recognizable vegetables. We received our first full Red Cross boxes. And the camp guards said “hello” in English instead of striking us with their rifle butts for not bowing.

After lunch, the camp commander, flanked by trucks mounted with machine guns, gathered us on the camp’s parade ground. He curtly announced, “America and Japan now friends. War is over.”

There is no accurate way to describe how it feels to be a slave one moment—starved and abused, forced to work long hours in a treacherous mine, beaten daily for not working fast enough or not bowing low enough—and a free man the next.

After more than two years underground in the dark, narrow seams of a coal mine, it was glorious to be in the sun. American planes soon appeared overhead and with them came parachutes carrying 55-gallon drums of food, clothing, medicines and magazines. One parachute failed to open, its cargo of fruit salad spilling out onto the camp yard. We happily and immediately dined on the scattered remains.

Baron Mitsui, a 1915 Dartmouth graduate who owned our coal mine and many others, hosted a series of dinners for senior Allied commanding officers of our POW camp. The baron had often visited his captive village and was aware of the grim conditions. Over the meals, he reportedly asked the officers for their tolerance and thanked them for their efforts. Photos from the dinner series show a wary indulgence in the eyes of the American, Australian, British and Dutch guests.

Fast forward to last month, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the same word—tolerance—in his statement on the 70th anniversary of the war’s end. “How much emotional struggle must have existed and what great efforts must have been necessary . . . for the former POWs who experienced unbearable sufferings caused by the Japanese military in order for them to be so tolerant nevertheless?” Mr. Abe marveled.

While I welcome any step, however modest, the Japanese make in addressing war crimes committed against POWs, this word stops me short. It makes a war crime a matter of inconvenience. I can tolerate someone cutting me off in traffic. But being a POW was not a matter of tolerance. It was a matter of life or death—mostly death.

The denial of water and food on the Bataan Death March didn’t simply inconvenience us; it killed thousands of soldiers. My fellow prisoners and I didn’t tolerate nor have we forgotten the beatings and torture, the starvation and broken bones, or the filth and stench of dying men. What tolerance did I have watching my buddy tortured so viciously that he had to have both legs amputated?

And what of today? Our wait for Japan’s apology, offered officially in February 2009, wasn’t tolerance. It was patience. Patience for justice.

Still, Mr. Abe’s awkward statement on Aug. 15 suggests that our patience may not be in vain. His mention of POWs is the only reference in the statement that clearly matches a noun of wrongdoing to a verb of responsibility. He correctly points out that “unbearable suffering” was “caused” by Imperial Japan’s military. Acknowledging the perpetrator of a crime and the crime itself is the first step toward reconciliation.

For me, the war is hard to forget. But as Mr. Abe points out, the postwar generations are now the majority in Japan. Japanese today aren’t responsible for what happened more than 70 years ago. But they also cannot forget or distort the past.

Japan owes me, the descendants of its victims and its own citizens the truth. As Mr. Abe said, “We Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future.”

Imperial Japan tormented, enslaved and defiled many people. This is a grave legacy to pass on and to teach future generations. But it is vital to keep memories like mine alive. It’s one thing to remember great deeds done by great men, like Gen. MacArthur in Tokyo Bay. But World War II’s history is composed of the suffering of many individuals in different circumstances. This, too, should not be forgotten, or else the lessons of the war will be incomplete.

Mr. Tenney served in the 192nd Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army.

Annals of Mitsui's Miike Mine: Charles Kamendat

Kamendat at 20

Note: Mr. Kamedat passed away August 9, 2015

In 1940, when 19-year-old Charlie Kamendat enlisted in the Army and left Port Huron, he was lean and well-muscled from a year of manual labor with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He weighed maybe 150 pounds.

Five years later, when he emerged from Japanese prison camp at Mitsui's Miike coal mine in Kyushu at the close of the Second World War, he weighed 60 pounds. He had been brutalized by Japanese soldiers and civilians alike. He survived battle, disease, starvation, maddening confinement, and senseless beatings.

He was a skeleton with a pulse, a survivor of Corregidor and Palawan and Nagasaki, someone who had endured 39 months of slave labor.

"I was a healthy young man when I went into the service," Kamendat said. "I came back a broken man."

KAMENDAT, 94, among the last of his generation. He lives at a nursing home in Fort Gratiot, Michigan and recently was widowed. His wife, of 66 years, Maxine died June 9, 2015.

Here's his story, taken in large part from a newspaper column written in December 2014.

Kamendat 79 in 2000

Kamendat was born in Detroit on July 17, 1921, but he grew up in Port Huron, Michigan during the Depression.

He quit school after 10th grade and worked for a year with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin. Afterward, he returned to Port Huron and took a factory job, but didn't much like it.

"I joined the Army in 1940," he recalled. "I went to the recruiting sergeant and said, 'How far can I get from Port Huron?'

"He said, 'How about Manila in the Philippines? It's 12,000 miles.'" He became part of the US Army's Coast Artillery Corps, 59th Coast Artillery Regiment, 3rd Battalion, K Battery. His job was harbor defenses of Manila And Subic Bay

HE ARRIVED at Corregidor, an island-fortress in Manila Bay, in May 1941. When Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, the 59th was at battle stations. He was assigned the searchlight battery at Ft. Mills, helping man fixed 60" Searchlights Nos, 1 thru 8, plus a number of 60" and 30" mobile seacoast searchlights.

Saturation bombing and artillery fire was started against Corregidor on December 29, 1941, and by the middle of January 1942, no spot on the island was more than 25 yards from a shell or bomb crater. During this period, the 59th fired the first rounds that any U.S. Artillery unit had fired in a coast artillery role since the Civil War.

For five months, against overwhelming odds, American and Filipino defenders held out on Bataan Peninsular and at Corregidor, the "Gibraltar of the East." [Siege of Corregidor]

"After you run out of everything, what can you do?" Kamendat asked. "We exhausted everything we had."

On April 9, 1942, Bataan was surrendered. On May 6, 1942, the besieged defenders of Corregidor surrendered.

Three Presidential Unit Citations, embroidered Bataan, Manila and Subic Bay, and Defense of the Philippines, were awarded to the 59th regiment along with the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation streamer, for the defense of the Philippines from 7 December 1941 to 6 May 1942, The Campaign Streamer embroidered Philippine Islands is carried on the unit colors.

As a POW, Kamendat felt the racism and anger of the Japanese victors. He witnessed the contempt Japanese soldiers felt for their prisoners.

"They really liked to embarrass people," he recalled. "When Corregidor fell, the first thing they did was tell us to take our clothes off. When there was a pile of clothes 10 feet high, they said, 'OK, now everybody has five minutes to get dressed.'"

The prisoners were taken first to Bilibid, an old Spanish prison in Manila, then to Cabanatuan Camp No. 1 for a month or so. The next stop for Kamendat was Palawan, an island on the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines.

Palawan is one of the most remote places on Earth. "It's also one of the most beautiful," Kamendat said.

After building a military airstrip, most of the prisoners were shipped back to Bilibid Prison. It was a brief stay.

The Hell Ship

"After a day or two, they lined up 500 Americans and put us on what we called a Hell ship," he said. "We were packed like sardines in the holds of the ship. There was no room to move. You used the bathroom where you sat."

It was July 23, 1943. The Hell ship Clyde Maru arrived in Moji, Japan on August 9th. 1943. The men were transported by train from Moji station to camp Fukuoka 17 at Omuta, Kyushu, arriving on 10 Aug 1943.

In hindsight, a voyage to Japan aboard a Hell ship was preferable to Palawan. On December 14, 1944 the Japanese went forward with a "kill all" order and massacred the remaining 150 American prisoners rather than let them be rescued as Allied forces retook the island later that month. Eleven Americans escaped to tell the tragedy of the Palawan Massacre.

Survivor of Palawan Massacre
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As one survivor recalled, a group of Americans who escaped the initial effort to burn them alive was trapped at the base of a cliff. He saw them run up to the Japanese soldiers and ask to be shot in the head. The soldiers laughed and instead shot or bayoneted them in the stomach. When the men cried out for another bullet to end their misery, the Japanese continued to make merry of it all and left them there to suffer. Twelve men were killed in this fashion.


LUCKY KAMENDAT BECAME #348, a slave laborer at Miike Coal Mine near Omuta, located across a bay from Nagasaki on Kyushu Island in southern Japan. He was among the first POWs at Mitsui's POW camp.

The mine had been abandoned years earlier by Mitsui Mining Co., but pillars of coal remained to support the roof. To remove those pillars was to challenge death. It was the job given to POWs.

On July 5, 2015, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee voted to allow the mine to be a World Heritage site celebrating Japan's industrial development. It remains to be seen if there will be mention of the nearly 2,000 Allied POWs who were slave laborers at the mine.

"We worked with 90-pound jackhammers. The jackhammers weighed more than I did," Kamendat said. "We'd drill holes and pack them with dynamite, then go around the corner and wait for the blast. We'd shovel coal and go on to the next pillar."

It's what he did 12 hours a day, seven days a week, month after dreary month.

"We got a box of rice to eat every day," Kamendat said, using his hands to describe a box about the size of a paperback.

THE PRISON CAMP, known as Fukuoka No. 17, at one point held 1,859 prisoners, nearly half of them Americans but also large numbers of Australian, British and Dutch captives.

Of those, 138 men died, mostly from disease — pneumonia, colitis, scurvy, beriberi, tuberculosis, malaria — aggravated by malnutrition and exhaustion.

Others were murdered. One unfortunate Marine, James Pavlokos, was locked up and starved as punishment for stealing food. It took him 62 days to die.

"I have so many little stories," Kamendat told me, gazing out the window.

Cruelty was the common thread.

At the mine, soldiers guarded the prisoners outside, but civilians ran things inside. As many POWs at the Miike Mine remember, Mitsui's civilian workers were as cruel as the military guards.  One of Mitsui's superintendents, Kamendat recalled, "was exceptionally cruel. He liked having his sport with us. One day he told me to go into a hole and dig out the coal. I knew if I did, I was dead.

"He said, 'If you don't do it, I'll kill you.' I didn't do it, and he didn't kill me."

Kamendat shrugged. He did not smile.

"If you didn't look right, they'd kick you, knock you down. Or they might kill you for no reason at all. They had a thing for redheads; they didn't like redheads at all. I never found out why, but redheads didn't have a chance."

Another of his little stories: "One morning a sergeant woke up with a hangover and decided to take it out on a few of us. He broke my nose, then my collarbone.

"Here's a funny thing. The Japanese never hit you with their hands. They'd hit you with whatever was handy, but never with their hands."

ILLNESS WAS a fact of life. Kamendat contracted malaria, scurvy, pellagra and intestinal worms. Worst of all was beriberi, caused by a lack of vitamin B1.

"Man cannot live on rice alone," he observed.

The "wet" form of beriberi caused his legs to swell to elephantine enormity. He would have lost his legs except for a physician and fellow prisoner, Capt. Thomas Hewlett. Equipped with a razor and scissors, he operated on Kamendat's legs, draining off the fluid.

"It felt so good, I almost passed out," Kamendat said.

Hewlett later published an account of the ordeal at Fukuoka No. 17. It is full of macabre and angry anecdotes, such as: "One prisoner was executed for attempting to learn to read Japanese. He was utilized as the target for a bayonet drill by the guard detail. His body when examined showed over 75 stab wounds."

The doctor, writing in 1978, also lamented the Department of Veterans Affairs' long reluctance to recognize psychological wounds.

"The philosophy of the prisoner of war is a strange one, individually developed to make survival possible in the most hostile environment," Hewlett observed. "He first learned to laugh at the tragedies that comprised the everyday life. He completely obliterated the pangs of hunger. The starving man would willingly trade his meager ration for a few cigarettes."

KAMENDAT STILL WEARS a scar from a head wound suffered when a slab fell from the mine roof.

He was lucky. The rock also struck Sgt. Hez Sallee, of Harrodsburg, Kentucky. "It cut him in half," Kamendat said.

For all his suffering, the young private from Port Huron never lost his will to live.

"One of the fellows told me, 'You've got the right stock in you. You're going to make it.' And I told him, 'Well, my Mama wants to see me, not you.' I always knew I'd survive."

For many years, he spoke at local schools, carrying a message of perseverance: "I tell them, 'Nothing's so bad you can't overcome it.'"

ON AUGUST 9, 1945, the second American atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. In a heartbeat, 40,000 lives were lost. Coupled with the bomb at Hiroshima, which killed as many as 80,000 people in the initial blast, it broke the Japanese will to continue the war.

Across the bay, 35 miles from Nagasaki, August 9 was just another day of digging coal.

"We were in the mine when they dropped the bomb," Kamendat said. "We were down four levels, which is deep. I didn't feel anything, didn't hear anything, which isn't surprising. It's noisy in a mine."

What does surprise Kamendat is that so many people know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so few know of Nanking, the Chinese city where as many as 300,000 civilians were massacred by the Japanese with horrific efficiency: babies bayoneted, pregnant women gutted, soldiers wielding machetes until they could no longer raise their arms.

He is unsure why most people know the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, but almost no one in the United States realizes the Japanese killed as many as 20 million Chinese civilians.

"People will tell you it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb," he said, "and when you talk to them, you find out they've never even heard of the Rape of Nanking."

He shook his head and again gazed out the window.

WITH THE WAR at an end, the POWs had one thought: getting home.

"Rather than wait for someone to come and free us, we took it upon ourselves," Kamendat said.

He and a few other POWs found their way to an airfield where a B-29 Superfortress sat on the runway.

"The pilot was a good guy," Kamendat recalled. "He said, 'Where do you fellows want to go?'

"We said, 'Well, where are you going?'

"He said, 'Manila.'

"We said, 'Let's go.'"

In Manila, they were put aboard a Coast Guard ship for the voyage to San Francisco where Kamendat — 60 pounds soaking wet — was hospitalized for malnutrition and a heart disorder, likely caused by beriberi.

ON HIS RETURN to Port Huron, he took a job at Mueller Brass, where he would retire after a long career.

Despite lingering heart-related problems, he stayed trim and fit, bearing himself in the way of old soldiers, erect and vigilant.

This man who gave so much of himself — and who lost so much — holds no grudge against the Japanese people.

"Have I forgiven them?" he said, repeating the question. "Sure. People today in Japan don't know any more about it than the young people here do."

Not least of all, he has forgiven himself.

"After the war, we were ashamed of our situation, and we were quiet about it. I still remember feeling embarrassed about being a prisoner of war," he said. "I'm not ashamed any more. I'm not angry either."