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. 

Trump has never attended a Veterans Day at Arlington

 Vice President Pence at Arlington November 11, 2019

Nor has he, as past presidents have, hosted a Veterans Day breakfast for all the Veterans Service Organizations and prominent veterans. Former American POWs of Japan attended these during the Obama years.

There have been three Veterans Day ceremonies at Arlington Cemetery thus far under the Trump Administration. President Donald Trump has not attended once. Twice he planned to be out of town and once he did know it was important and he was tired from returning from a trip to France where he noted he had already been to a military cemetery.

This 2019 article from the Military Times describes what Trump as done instead.

Here’s Where President Donald Trump Will Spend Veterans Day

9 Nov 2019 Military.com | By Richard Sisk

President Donald Trump will not be attending the traditional wreath-laying ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. Instead he’ll speak at the start of the Veterans Day parade in New York City, billed as the nation’s largest.

On Wednesday, the United Veterans War Council, which organizes the annual Manhattan parade, announced that Trump would be at the kickoff of the event with other honorees in Madison Square Park, off Fifth Avenue.

The White House later confirmed that Trump would be going to the parade. The New York City tradition began 100 years ago, with a huge ticker-tape parade for returning troops from World War I. Many of the marchers this year will be dressed as doughboys.

Trump is not expected to march in the parade, but Gen. David Berger, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, will lead a contingent of Marines along the 5th Avenue route.

In a statement, Douglas McGowan, chairman of the nonprofit United Veterans War Council, said Trump would be the first president to attend the city’s Veterans Day parade.

“On behalf of all the men and women who have served our nation, and who continue to serve, the United War Veterans Council is honored that our Commander-in- Chief, President Donald J. Trump, has agreed to join our 100th annual tribute,” McGowan said. “This is a day when we put politics aside to focus on honoring our veterans.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has often traded insults with Trump, appeared willing to call a truce for Veterans Day.

He told City Hall reporters that the day “should not be politicized. It should not be a spectacle. If he’s really coming here to truly honor veterans, God bless him.”

Last week, Trump drew a chorus of boos, mixed with some cheers, when he showed up at an Ultimate Championship Fighting event in Madison Square Garden.

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won 79% of the vote in New York City overall, compared to 19% for Trump. However, Trump won on Staten Island, 57%-40%.

Trump, who grew up in Queens and made his reputation in the city’s fiercely competitive real estate business, will be coming back to the city after recently declaring that New York was no longer his hometown. He changed his permanent residence to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

In a tweet, Trump said he still loved the city, “but unfortunately, despite the fact that I pay millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year, I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state. Few have been treated worse.”

Trump also currently is fighting a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney for his personal and business tax records.

Presidents have typically attended ceremonies and the traditional wreath-laying at Arlington on Veterans Day, though there are some exceptions. President Barack Obama was at Arlington for six of the eight years he was in office. He was traveling overseas the other two times.

In 2008, President George W. Bush marked Veterans Day at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan.

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he was in Vietnam on Veterans Day and attended a commemorative event there with Vietnam veterans. Vice President Mike Pence represented the administration at Arlington in 2017.

In 2018, Trump arrived back at the White House the night before Veterans Day after attending World War I armistice 100th anniversary ceremonies in France. He stayed at the White House on Veterans Day and Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie represented the administration at Arlington.

In a later interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump said he probably should have gone to Arlington for Veterans Day in 2018, but appeared to be mistaken on where he was on Veterans Day in 2017.

“In retrospect, I should have done, and I did last year and I will virtually every year,” Trump said. “But we had come in very late at night and I had just left, literally, the American cemetery in Paris and I really probably assumed that was fine.”

“I was extremely busy because of affairs of state, doing other things,” Trump said, “but I would have done it.”

The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and The Defeat of Japan

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“Mr. Straight Arrow,” John Hersey, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb: A Book Review

by D. M. Giangreco

D. M. Giangreco is the author of 13 books including Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947(Naval Institute Press, 2017) and The Soldier from Independence: A Military Biography of Harry Truman. Vol. I: 1906-1919(Potomac Books, 2018). His Journal of Military History article “Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasions of Japan: Planning and Policy Implications” was awarded the Society for Military History's Moncado Prize.

First published in History News Network, August 4, 2019

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Roy Scranton’s ”How John Hersey Bore Witness” (The New Republic, July-August 2019) is an insightful look at a new book on one of my favorite authors. It touched all the right notes and has prompted me to add Mr. Straight Arrow to my “Christmas list.” Sadly, in the midst of this otherwise fine review, author Scranton repeats the discredited old chestnut that President Harry S. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though he knew Japan was trying to surrender. Truman’s real reason for using the weapons, according to Scranton, was to employ them as a diplomatic club against the Soviet Union. This allegation was popular in some quarters during the 1960s and 70s, but was only sustained by a systematic falsifying of the historical record and it continues to pop up even today.

Underscoring this sad fact is the link Scranton provides which takes readers to a 31-year-old letter to the New York Times from Truman critic Gar Alperovitz purporting that “dropping the atomic bomb was seen by analysts at the time as militarily unnecessary.” Presented in the letter is an interesting collection of cherry-picked quotes from a variety of diary entries and memos by contemporaries of Truman, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower. All are outtakes and have been long rebutted or presented in their actual contexts. Even key figures are misidentified. For example, FDR’s White House chief of staff Admiral William D. Leahy, who chaired the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is elevated in the letter to the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

As for the notion that Japan was trying to surrender, this is not what was beheld by America’s leaders who were reading the secretly decrypted internal communications of their counterparts in Japan.

In the summer of 1945, Emperor Hirohito requested that the Soviets accept a special envoy to discuss ways in which the war might be “quickly terminated.” But far from a coherent plea to the Soviets to help negotiate a surrender, the proposals were hopelessly vague and recognized by both Washington and Moscow as no more than a stalling tactic ahead of the Potsdam Conference to prevent Soviet military intervention --- an intervention that Japanese leaders had known was inevitable ever since the Soviets’ recent cancellation of their Neutrality Pact with Japan.

Japan was not trying to surrender. Even after the obliteration of two cities by nuclear weapons and the Soviet declaration of war the militarists in firm control of the Imperial government refused to admit defeat until their emperor finally forced the issue. They had argued that the United States would still have to launch a ground invasion and that the subsequent carnage would force the Americans to sue for peace leaving of much of Asia firmly under Japanese control.

The war had started long before Pearl Harbor with the Japanese invasion of China, and millions had already perished. That Asians in the giant arc from Indonesia through China --- far from Western eyes --- were dying by the hundreds of thousands each and every month that the war continued has been of zero interest to Eurocentric writers and historians be they critics or supporters of Truman’s decision. As for the president, himself, Truman rightfully hoped, after the bloodbaths on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, that atomic bombs might force Japan’s surrender and forestall the projected two-phase invasion which would result in “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

Hersey understood this well. Fluent in Chinese (he was born and raised in China), Hersey was painfully aware of the almost unimaginable cost of the war long before the United States became involved and, after it did, observed the savagery of battle on Guadalcanal first hand. Yes, he understood it quite well and it will come as a surprise, even shock, to many that neither Hersey nor Truman saw Hiroshima as an indictment of the decision to use the bomb.

Those were very different times and the prevailing attitude, according to George M. Elsey, was “look what Japanese militarism and aggression hath wrought!” (Truman also made similar observations when touring the rubble of Berlin during the Potsdam Conference.) The president considered Hiroshima an “important” work and, far from being persona non grata, Hersey would sometimes spend days at a time in Truman’s company when preparing articles for The New Yorker. This level of access was not accorded to other journalists and circumstances resulted in Hersey sitting in on key events such as when Truman learned that the Chinese had just entered the Korean War and a secret meeting with Senate leaders over the depredations of Joe McCarthy.

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Although exceptions can be found in the literature, Hersey’s Hiroshima was simply not viewed in the postwar period as an anti-nuclear polemic and Elsey, who served in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations before going on to head the American Red Cross for more than a decade, remarked to David McCullough that “It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”


Scranton, himself, gives a brief nod to this fact, admitting that the midnight conventional firebombing of Tokyo earlier that year killed even more people, approximately 100,000, yet one shudders to think what he teaches to his unsuspecting students. The “revisionist” Japanese-were-trying-to-surrender hoax prominently recited in his review of Mr. Straight Arrow has long been consigned to the garbage heap of history by a host of scholarly books and articles* including, ironically, a brilliant work by one of Scranton’s own colleagues at Notre Dame.

Father Wilson D. Miscamble’s The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and The Defeat of Japan(Cambridge University Press, 2011) is a hard hitting, well researched effort that is especially notable for its thoughtful exploration of the moral issues involved. Though Scranton and Miscamble share the same campus, a colleague of mine maintains that the two scholars have never met. Perhaps they should get together for coffee some morning.

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* Six particularly useful works are: Sadao Asada’s award winning, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender -- A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review, 67 (November 1998); Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and “The Historiography of Hiroshima: The Rise and Fall of Revisionism,” The New England Journal of History, 64 (Fall 2007); Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C., The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Robert James Maddox, ed., Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Robert P. Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004)

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.