Medal of Honor

Jilin Province

With the Medal of Honor so much in the news (see VFW National Commander's Statement), it seems appropriate to highlight one of the several POWs of Japan who received one: General Jonthan M. Wainwright, the highest-ranking American officer taken prisoner during WWII. 

He had succeeded General Douglas MacArthur as commander of Allied troops in the Philippines when the latter was evacuated to Australia. Wainwright oversaw the drawn-out surrender of the Philippines to Imperial Fascist Japan from May 6 to June 9, 1942. He spent the rest of the war in brutal Japanese POW camps.

Seventy-nine years ago on August 19, 1945, two OSS commandos turned up in Wainwright's Northern Chinese POW camp to tell him the war had ended. He was physically liberated by the Russian Army five days later. And on the 27th he flew out of Mukden to the Philippines and then on to Japan to participate in the official surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.

Earlier in August, the OSS initiated Operation Cardinal to liberate the American and Allied senior officers Japan had captured at the beginning of the war. First held in a series of  POW Camp in Formosa, these generals and colonels were transferred to Manchuria in the fall of 1944. Circumstantial evidence suggested that POW officers were being concentrated in a few remote locations to be used as hostages, whereas the enlisted men who were POWs were to be executed as the war became more desperate. 

The OSS believed the senior POW officers were with other POWs at a camp in Mukden, Manchukuo, today's Shenyang. When the OSS team liberated Mukden they were stunned to learn that 34 of the most senior officers, including Wainwright, were held over 100 miles northeast of Mukden in Hsian. This sentence regarding Wainwright's location, a variation of which is found in most accounts of Wainwright's rescue, is inexact and generally incorrect.  

The coal town of Hsian is identified in various articles on Wainwright's rescue as Sian, Xi'an, or Hsian and located 100 KM and even 100 miles northeast of Mukden. After a lot of research, I can say the correct location is: Hsian (today's Liaoyuan), which is approximately 220.9 km (137.261 miles) northeast of Mukden (today's Shenyang). Liaoyuan is situated on the north bank of the upper Dongliao River. This camp was 100 miles southeast of Zheng Village (today's Shuangliao) that was the initial camp that all the senior POW officers and enlisted men from Formosa were sent to in November 1944. Both towns are in today's Jilin Province.

On December 1, 1944, 34 senior Allied Officers were separated from the rest of POWs from Formosa and moved to Hsian from Zheng Village. There they waited and starved until the OSS, after much mishap, appeared on August 19th. The story of the eventual liberation of the generals there and their return home is well told in this article: The OSS’ Operation Cardinal: Locating General Jonathan Wainwright: The OSS Cardinal Mission located General Jonathan Wainwright at a Japanese prison camp in Manchuria By John Mancini, Warfare History Network, November 2006. 

The award of the Medal of Honor had been proposed for Wainwright as early as 1942. MacArthur, however, vehemently opposed it, believing that Corregidor should have held out longer and that Wainwright had surrendered too soon. In 1945, Wainwright was again proposed for the Medal of Honor, and this time MacArthur did not object. It should be noted that MacArthur was never so generous to General Edward P. King who surrendered the peninsula of Bataan on April 9, 1942. 

The citation lauds Wainwright's heroism in command of the doomed defenders and reads in part: “…At the repeated risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in his position, he frequented the firing line of his troops where his presence provided the example and incentive that helped make the gallant efforts of these men possible. The final stand on beleaguered Corregidor, for which he was in an important measure personally responsible, commanded the admiration of the Nation’s allies. It reflected the high morale of American arms in the face of overwhelming odds. His courage and resolution were a vitally needed inspiration to the then sorely pressed freedom-loving peoples of the world.”

When freed by the OSS men, Wainwright worried that he was considered a coward, derelict in his duty, by the American people. When they informed him that he was actually a national hero, the emaciated general was incredulous. MacArthur was adamant about having him included in the signing of the surrender document. Wainwright was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City on September 13, 1945, and promoted to the four-star rank of full general. On September 19, 1945, he received the Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman in the Rose Garden of the White House. 

Happy Birthday General Wainwright

Wainwright at liberation August 1945

Today, is the anniversary of General Jonathan Wainwright's 62nd birthday. In 1945, he celebrated while not quite a free man. He was liberated the next day, the 24th. Wainwright was in a Japanese POW camp in Northern China where he and other high-value Allied officers were held. As head of U.S. Forces in the Philippines, he surrendered Corregidor on May 6, 1942 and the rest of Philippines within the following days.

On August 16, 1945, a six-man Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team parachute into (Hoten) Mukden (today’s Shenyang), POW camp in northern China to liberate the POWs and locate the senior officers held by the Japanese. On the 19th, several dozen British, Dutch, and American senior officers including Lieutenant Generals Jonathan Wainwright and A.E. Percival were located at the Hsian POW camp (Xi'an or today's Liaoyuan), 150 miles north of Mukden. This was the first they heard that the war had ended.

When Wainwright and the other captive officers, enlisted men, and civilians were told of the war's end on August 19, he recounted, "We roared suddenly with laughter ... roared until the rest of [the interpreter's] words were blotted out. There was no stopping the laughter. It came up in me, and in the others, with an irresistible force: something born of a combination of our relief, the look on [the interpreter's] face, the blind preposterousness of his beginning, the release from years of tension, the utter, utter joy over having survived to see this blessed day."

However, the prisoners still had to wait for the arrival of the Russian Red Army on August 24th in order to move out. The Japanese, noted Wainwright, left the prisoners the remaining Red Cross packages and they "began having fine, well-cooked meals, the first sufficient food we had since the outbreak of the war. We smoked American cigarettes like chimneys." With the "prospect of getting home soon," Wainwright said he celebrated "the happiest birthday in many years."

The years of captivity took its toll on the general. He had endured prison camps on the Philippines, Formosa, and China. The man who had been nicknamed “Skinny” was now emaciated and drawn. His hair had turned white, and his skin was cracked and fragile. He was also depressed, believing he would be blamed for the loss of the Philippines to the Japanese.

When Wainwright arrived in Yokohama, Japan, to attend the formal surrender ceremony, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his former commander, was stunned at his appearance. Wainwright was given a hero’s welcome upon returning to America, promoted to full general and awarded the Medal of Honor.

🌷You can leave virtual flowers at his Grave HERE.