In my father’s footsteps on the death railway

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Although many memoirs and histories have been written of the POW of Japan experience, few have been consider "literature." The books have not transcended from being a simple record of events to the art of telling a universal cultural tale. This has been in part because few of the stories told have been written with the skill or grace of an Anne Frank or an Elie Wiesel. Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken seems to have begun to fill this void. Hopefully, the related movie to be released this Christmas will provide more art to embed it into the national imagination.

Last month, Richard Flanagan the son of an Australian POW who slaved on the Thai-Burma Death railway was awarded prestigious Man Booker Prize for English Fiction for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It is a fictionalized account of the building of the Thai-Burma Death railway and living as its survivor.

Unlike Unbroken, it is not about virtue. The book’s hero, a doctor, and one assumes Flanagan too, is not romantic about war. He doesn’t believe that suffering is a kind of grace that lends virtue to the sufferers. Indeed, Evans “hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves.” Virtue, he believed, was just “vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” This book is the next step in embedding the POW story into our national culture.

After slaving on the Burma-Thai Death Railroad, Flanagan's father was shipped to Japan to slave in a coal near Hiroshima on the In-land Sea, Hiroshima #9-B, the Ohama Mine in Onoda. The third book of Australian Ray Parkin's Wartime Trilogy novel of his experience as POW of Japan, The Sword and the Blossom, is an account of moving from the Death Railroad to this mine.

For an excellent analysis of the Flanagan novel, see Ian Buruma in the November 20th New York Review of Books.
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Turning his father’s experiences as a Japanese POW into a Booker prize-winning novel became a pilgrimage for Richard Flanagan. Below he writes for the London Times how it took him from the jungles of Thailand and their ghosts to Tokyo, where he met the Lizard, a notorious camp guard. [Richard Flanagan, The Sunday Times (London) Published: 19 October 2014]

Allied prisoners toiling on the railway. (Topham Picturepoint/Press Association)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature. Written in 1689 by Matsuo Basho, the greatest of all haiku poets, it takes the form of a haibun, a nature journal that records a journey in prose and haiku.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, one of those put to work on what in Australia is known as the Death Railway. A pharaonic project, the railway was pushed more than 250 miles through wild jungle in what was then Siam — and is today Thailand — and Burma in less than a year in 1943.

It was built by more than a quarter of a million slave labourers working mostly naked, with almost no machinery and only the most basic of hand tools. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. More corpses than Hiroshima. More corpses than there are words in my novel.

My father was a survivor of that, of cholera, of the hell ships that took POWs to Japan, of being a slave labourer in a coalmine under the Inland Sea, south of Hiroshima, at the war’s end. If Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father and his mates’ experience is one of its lowest.

For 12 years I tried to write a novel about that experience and all it suggested to me. And for 12 years other novels came and went as I continued to be unable to write this one. I wrote five wildly different novels attempting somehow to tell this story, all of them failures, all files which I deleted and all manuscripts which I burnt. I understood, although it made no sense, that this was the book I had to write if I was to keep on writing. And yet I could not write it.

Then I realised that my father, by now in his nineties, was growing frail and weak and although there was no logical reason to think such a thing, I felt I had to somehow finish this novel before he died.

Flanagan’s father, Archie, was also a slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine

For a year I visited and called with endless questions about daily life in the camp. What came first, roll call or breakfast? How does a rotting shin bone revealed by a blossoming tropical ulcer smell? What was it like having cholera?

My memories of my father when I was a child are of a sick man, debilitated by his war experience. We grew up with a man of often strange anxieties and deep compassion, whose stories of his POW experiences, while often funny, were compounded of love and pity. But I did not want the book to be about him. As much as his experience and perspective would influence it, I did not want some fictionalised version of his life. As much as it was about my father and me, it had to escape us both.

I went to Thailand and walked up and found the site of my father’s camp, walked that bitter track through the jungle from that camp to what little remained of the railway and the dead, overgrown embankments and cuttings. And I realised that the novel had to be a love story. Why?

Because great love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth about love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. War stories are the great story of death. War illuminates love; while love — if it does not redeem war — is the highest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life.

Friedrich Nietzsche regarded hope as the cruellest of human torments because it prolongs suffering. But it is also the nub of who we are. Not for nothing were the most forsaken in the Nazi death camps the muselmänner, those without hope. Similarly art — when it seeks to speak of darkness but does not allow for hope — will finally fail. Without hope such art is untrue to what we know as a fundamental truth of ourselves.

And I had long been taken by a story my parents were fond of.

A Latvian man they knew, a postwar refugee, caught up in the vast movements of lives that the Second World War had involved, had returned to his home village after the war, to find it razed and his wife, he was told, dead. He searched the wastelands of postwar Europe for her for two years and finally had to accept the truth: that she had perished. He emigrated to Australia, met another woman, married and had children.

(Getty)

In 1957 he visited Sydney. Walking down a crowded street he saw walking towards him his Latvian wife, alive, with a child on either hand. At that moment he had to decide whether he would acknowledge her or walk on.

This beautiful story had always moved me. I started my novel yet again, with this image at its heart. Now it was a love story and its leading character a figure utterly unlike my father — a doctor who is the POW commander in one camp and who, after the war, is celebrated as a war hero but feels himself to be anything but that.

My father worried that people would forget what had happened and he trusted me that I might write something that encouraged people to remember. If my father was helpful with my endless questioning of minute detail, he never asked me what the story was. He allowed me the freedom to write as I have to write.

Yet I felt, rather shamefully, that perhaps I would not be able to finish the novel until he died, as though there was something in all this that held me back.

Towards the end of 2012, with the novel taking its final form, I resolved to visit Japan.

There I searched and found several guards who had worked on the Death Railway. I met a man who had been a Japanese army medical orderly and had been at my father’s camp. It looked, he said, like a Buddhist hell. He recalled skeletons crawling around in the mud. He told me the Australians were very bad with their hygiene. The Japanese took hot baths. The Australians did not. I paid for his tea and taxi home.

Five minutes before meeting another guard who had been on the Death Railway, I realised that he was the one who had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, the man the Australians called “the Lizard”. The meeting was to be in the offices of a taxi company owned by his son in outer suburban Tokyo.

The Lizard had been sentenced to death for war crimes after the war. Later he had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment and then was released in a general amnesty in 1956. He is the only man I have ever heard my father — a gentle, peaceful man — speak of with violent intent.

Lee Hak-rae,  as he is now, was a dignified, gracious and generous old man [Korean Japanese]. Near the end of our meeting I asked him to slap me. Violent face-slapping — known as binta — was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously.

It was a curious request and the old man took some persuasion. Finally we stood up, facing each other. I asked him to slap me as hard as he could. Of his slaps, I recall only how clean and dry the skin of his aged hand was as it struck me.

On the third blow the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea. For a moment I thought I was going mad. But in one of those coincidences in which reality delights, but fiction — for fear of being unrealistic — is never permitted, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. For half a minute, as the room swayed and a wall of tossing taxi keys made a shimmering tingle, I saw the Lizard frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it was not in that room with that old man and me.

I went south to where my father was a slave labourer and the mayor of Sanyo Onoda city met me in front of television cameras to apologise.  I met villagers who remembered Australians arriving in that terrible winter of late 1944, skeletons in shorts. I met more guards. I was photographed by local media with one guard at the site of the camp where my father thought he would die in the spring of 1945. Below us, where once stood the minehead the POWs would run a gauntlet of sadistic guards to enter, there now stood a love hotel.

It was a bitterly cold day. We put our arms around one another for a photograph. A tiny, frail man, Mr Sato then curled into me in the manner children do when seeking forgiveness. Or perhaps he was just cold. When the photograph was taken, I took my arm away. Mr Sato stayed where he was, curling inwards.

That night I ended up drinking in a Japanese hostess bar with Kenji Yasushige,  the Sanyo Onada city council’s international relations and equal opportunities officer. As Kenji crooned a karaoke ballad to the largely empty bar, one of the hostesses looked at me and, smiling, asked why I was visiting the city.

“My father was a slave labourer here during the war,” I said.

“Really?” she replied, continuing to look at me with her dreamy, anime eyes. “What is slave labourer?”

There is strangeness in the world beyond any words.

My father, who was not a man for such things, rang within a few hours of my returning home. He wanted to know what had happened. He was 98, frail, but his mind was still good, his recall phenomenal. I told him how the Japanese people had been unfailingly kind and generous and how, amazingly, I had met some guards who had been at his camps, including the Lizard. He asked me what they said.

I thought of the earthquake. Of Mr Sato curling inwards. Of the near-empty hostess bar.

I said they talked in detail about all of their lives, except the camps where details seemed to elude them, but that I felt nevertheless that they carried shame, and how each one had expressed their sorrow and apologies for what had happened, and asked me to pass them on to my father.

My father stopped talking. After some time he said he had to go, and hung up.

Later that day my father lost all memory of his time in the POW camps. And yet his pre-war memory remained strong. He knew in an abstract way — as you know you have been in the womb — that he had been in the camps, but no memory remained. It was as though he were finally free.

For the next four months I lived mostly by myself on an island off the coast of Tasmania and I rewrote the novel. I felt I had written all my books in order to write this one book, to somehow communicate the incommunicable.

I emailed the final draft of my novel to my publisher on the Monday before Anzac Day. My father was ill, and I was with him early that morning. He asked how the book was going. I told him it was finally done.

He died that night.

In truth the novel was not quite done. There was some intensive rewriting, as is my way when publication approaches. And I see now what I could not see then, that hanging over it all, shaping everything, were his looming death and the question of love. But you only understand such things — and then only imperfectly — long after you have written the last word.

One thing did not change — the dedication: “To prisoner san byaku san ju go.” It was my father’s Japanese prison number, 335.

He had taught it to me as I was growing up as his son — a child of the narrow road to the deep north.

American POWs of Japan in Japan

At Japan's National Press Club October 15, 2015

5^th Delegation of American Former 

POWs of Japan

October 11-20, 2014

 Anthony (Tony) COSTA, 94, lives in Concord, California, the town in which he was born on January 8, 1920.  After graduating from Mt. Diablo High School, he worked in the nearby oil refineries. In December 1939, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He became a member of the legendary 4^th Marine Regiment, also known as the “China Marines”, stationed in Shanghai on Embassy guard duty. In late November 1941, the China Marines were transferred to Olongapo on The Philippines Islands.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, December 7, 1941, the most of the China Marines were moved to Corregidor Island in the Bay of Manila. On reaching Corregidor on 29 December, Pfc Costa was assigned to the newly formed 3d Battalion, Company L to engage in beach defenses until surrender on May 6, 1942. For three weeks, in the tropical sun with little food or water, the Japanese kept the POWs at the 92nd Garage area. Taken to Manila on May 25^th, the survivors of Siege of Corregidor were paraded down Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison on what was called the "March of Shame” before the Filipinos and foreign residents. The following day they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp. At Cabanatuan, 2,660 POWs died due to poor sanitation, starvation rations, limited medical care, and abuse.  On November 7, 1942, he was taken by the Hellship Nagato Maru via Formosa to the Japanese port of Moji, the main disembarkation point for most POW transport ships. He arrived by train on November 26^th, Thanksgiving Day, in Osaka. He remembers that the rags and loincloths that had been adequate in the Philippines were insufficient for the biting cold found in Japan. The POWs were never given adequate clothing that first winter. With many of the POWs from Nagato Maru, Costa worked for Nippon Express as a slave stevedore in the freight yards in and around the city of Osaka at Umeda Bunsho Camp in Osaka (Osaka 2-D UMEDA). In March 1945, after his POW camp was firebombed, he was transferred to Osaka POW Camp 5-B TSURUGA were he was again a slave stevedore for Nippon Express and Tsuruga Transportation Company. Costa was liberated in September 1945. During the defense of Corregidor, 72 members of the 4^th Marines were killed in action. Of the 1,487 members of the 4th Marines captured on the Philippines Islands, 474 died in captivity. Following repatriation, Mr. Costa returned to California where he became a heavy machinery factory worker. In 1949, Mr. Costa built his own house, in which he still lives, and became the construction inspector of his hometown of Concord. He received his Purple Heart and Bronze Star 50 years after the fact, but he is still fighting to receive his back pay for his time as a POW.

POW#: UNKNOWN

Daniel W. CROWLEY, 92, a Connecticut native lives in Simsbury, Connecticut.

In 1940, the age of 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps hoping to “take long trip somewhere at the expense of our country. He was sent to The Philippines in January 1941 and stationed in Manila at Nichols Field with the 24^th Pursuit Group, V Interceptor Command, 17^th Pursuit Squadron. With the start of the war after the after bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was sent to fight on the Bataan Peninsula as part of Provisional Air Corps Infantry Regiment. Although designated as infantry, U.S. Army refuses to this day to recognize the veterans as such and denies them their Combat Infantry badges. After the Bataan Peninsula was surrendered April 9, 1942, his unit made their way to the tip of Bataan and the town of Mariveles to surrender. Refusing to become prisoners, they hide among rocks on the shore and then made their way to Corregidor aboard life boats with sailors from various American ships that had been scuttled in Manila Bay and Mariveles Harbor. On Corregidor he became part of the 4th Marines regimental reserve under Maj. Max Schaeffer working shore defense. On May 6, 1942, he became a POW of Japan with the fall of Corregidor. On May 25^th, he and other POWs who were interned in the 92nd Garage Area were paraded through Manila on the “March of Shame.” He was then taken by rail and foot to the POW Camp Cabanatuan. In the summer of 1942, Crowley was sent to the island of Palawan where he labored with other POWs building an airstrip. He was returned to Manila in early 1944. On December 14, 1944, the Japanese, believing an U.S. invasion imminent, herded his friends, the remaining 150 prisoners at Palawan into a shelter, dumped in gasoline, and set them on fire while machine-gunning escapees. Some prisoners did succeed to escape the massacre, but 139 men were killed. Crowley was sent to Japan via Formosa on March 24, 1944 aboard the Hellship, Taikoku Maru arriving April 3^rd. He was taken to Hitachi then to Tochigi, Japan where he was a slave laborer mining copper ore for Furukawa Kogyo. (today’s Furukawa Company Group) at Ashio POW Camp Tokyo 9-B until the end of the war. Returning home, Crowley became an insurance agent and raised a family. He says that veterans who were held prisoners of war by the Japanese were stigmatized."Corporations here in the states thought we were nuts," he said. "The majority of us re-joined the Army or worked for the postal service." Crowley believes he enjoyed a good life in Simsbury, but he will never forget the years stolen from him by the Japanese. "It's a living thing with me," he said. "It's not ancient history at all." His most recent efforts to recognize those with whom he served was advocating for the state legislature to name the bridge on Route 185 in Simsbury the “Bataan Corregidor Memorial Bridge” in memory of those soldiers who fought alongside Crowley and who lost their lives at the Battle of Bataan and the Battle of Corregidor. The dedication took place on December 7, 2013.

POW#: 101

Warren JORGENSON, 93, lives in Bennington, Nebraska. He grew up in a small town outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1939 and was stationed in Shanghai by May 1940 with the 4^th Marine Regiment, the legendary “China Marines.” They were deployed to the Philippines in November 1941, arriving days before the war began. He was wounded during the defense of Corregidor.. After the surrender of Corregidor on May 6, 1942 he was kept for nearly a year on the Island as a POW laborer and buried the dead. He was moved to Clark Field in 1943 working maintain the air strip. He was sent to Japan on August 27, 1944 aboard the Hellship Noto-Maru. Jorgenson remembers that there was not enough room to even stand up as they were stacked together. The tropical heat created a living hell and then the hatch covers were closed. The hold was airless and the heat unbearable. Sick, starved, and suffocating the POWs had only buckets provided for bathroom facilities. In Japan, he was taken to Sendai #6 (Hanawa) POW camp where he was a slave laborer for Mitsubishi Goushi Company (today’s Mitsubishi Materials) mining cooper ore. The mine closed in 1978 and was turned into a museum, the Osarizawa Mine Historical Site that recounts the 1300-year history of mining the mountain. Visitors can also go through some of the main tunnels. An amusement park and museum were opened in 1982 as “Mine Land Osarizawa.” In 2008, the site was renovated with the amusement section, Cosmo Adventure [sic], focused on space-themed indoor shooting games. The museum makes no mention of the slave laborers who worked the mine during the war. After repatriation, Mr. Jorgenson received a degree in Commercial Science from Drake University on the G.I. Bill.  He then went on to work in the phonograph music industry first at Capitol Records and then at Musicland.

POW#: 407

Oral C. NICHOLS, 93, lives in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  He is a 1939 graduate of Woodbury College (now Woodbury University) in Burbank, California.  Following graduation, he worked as a bookkeeper and as miner in California. He then joined Morrison-Knudsen, a Boise, Idaho-based construction company that was working to upgrade the airfield on Wake Island in the Pacific. When the war started on December 8, 1941, he participated, as a civilian medic in the legendary defense of Wake Island. For nearly two weeks, a garrison of some 400 Marines and a handful of the 1,500 civilians working on the atoll fought off an invading Japanese armada. It was the only time during the Pacific War that a Japanese amphibious assault was repelled. The battle was a rare example of success in the War's early months. After the island fell on December 23, 1941, the Japanese considered him and all the civilians as prisoners of war. He was sent with the majority of POWs in January 1942 to China. The POWs left on Wake were tasked with finishing the air strip and hard labor. On October 7, 1943, the 98 remaining POWs were bound with barbed wire and machined gunned to death. A lone, still unknown survivor scratched the date on a rock near the massacre. He was tracked down and beheaded. In China, Nichols was first placed at the Woosung Camp  outside of Shanghai. In December 1942, he was moved to Kiangwan another camp in the area. Nichols typing skills garnered him a clerk’s position at Kiangwan’s interpreter’s office. The chief interpreter, Isami Ishihara, was called the Beast of the East as he was exceedingly sadistic and was sentenced to death after the war. Nichols was eventually moved to Japan in May 1945 to Sendai Camp #11 Kamakita near Aomori in Northern Honshu. There he was a slave laborer in an open pit iron mine for Nippon Mining (today’s JX Nippon Mining and Materials). After repatriation, Nichols worked a variety of jobs in California and Arizona before moving back to his family’s ranch in New Mexico. It was not until 1981 that Congress enacted the bill that became a public law granting Nichols and the other civilians on Wake status as war veterans and provided them with honorable discharges and attendant benefits as U.S. Navy veterans.

POW#: 4410 and 4406

William R. “Bill” SANCHEZ, 96, a California native lives in Monterey Park, California. He grew up on the Eastside of Los Angeles.  He went on to study international trade and finance at Woodbury College (now Woodbury University) in Burbank, California and enrolled in graduate classes at the University of Southern California.  Believing that war was on the horizon, in 1940 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and asked to go to The Philippines. "I figured the Philippines is adventure," Sanchez recalled. He became an Army Sergeant with 59th Coast Artillery Regiment, Battery “I” assigned to Corregidor first working intelligence on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff and then harbor defense against the invading Japanese. He remembers he was in combat continually for five months until the island was surrendered on May 6, 1942. Battery “I” was the first to fire on the enemy. After surrender, he and fellow POW Harry Corre appeared in the famous staged photo at the entrance of Malinta Tunnel of the American surrenders with their hands in the air to Japanese forces. He, along with all the Americans captured on Corregidor, was forced to billet for three weeks at the 92nd Garage area on island with no protection from the sun and little food or water before they were moved to the main island. In Manila, the Japanese forced the survivors of Siege of Corregidor onto what is now called the "March of Shame” a “parade” through Manila from Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison. From there, he was taken to the POW camp at Cabanatuan.  Sanchez was among the first group of POWs moved to Japan. Deep in the cramped and fifthly hold of Hellship the Tottori Maru, Sanchez began his voyage to Japan on October 8, 1942. The ship traveled to Formosa, then Korea, and finally arrived in Moji, Japan on November 11^th.   In Japan, he was sent to Omori Tokyo Base Camp #1 work on reclaiming land.  Sanchez also worked as a slave stevedore for Nippon Tsuun (today’s Nippon Express) at the railway yards in Tokyo. Returning home, he worked for various companies in international trade. His work found him returning to Japan several times. He is an avid Los Angeles Angels baseball fan.

POW#: UNKNOWN

Library of Congress Veterans History Project:  http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/bib/66895

Jack W. SCHWARTZ, 98, lives in Hanford, California. He graduated from Hollywood High School when he was 15 years old.  At the California Institute of Technology, he earned both his BA and MS degrees in civil engineering. He worked at various engineering jobs until joining the U.S. Navy in 1940 as a lieutenant junior grade in the Civil Engineering Corps. After Schwartz’s first Navy assignment at Pearl Harbor, he was transferred to Guam in January 1941. On Guam, he was a Public Works officer, in charge of maintenance and inspecting new construction. The Japanese Navy attacked Guam several hours after Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941. The Battle of Guam lasted barely two days with the tiny Marine and Navy garrison quickly overwhelmed by Japan’s invading forces. On 10 December 1941, Guam became the first American territory formally surrendered to an enemy in WWII. One month later, Schwartz and most of the officers on Guam were boarded aboard Mitsui’s passenger ship Argentina Maru and transported to the Japanese port of Tadotsu on the island of Shikoku. Arriving in Japan on January 16, 1942, he was taken to the Zentsuji POW Camp about 400 miles west of Tokyo. During WWII, it held mainly officers plus enlisted ranks from Guam & Wake Island. It was used by the Japanese as a “show camp” for the Red Cross with marginally better conditions than others. At the camp, he was repeatedly beaten and put on reduced rations for asking camp officials for better food and medical supplies. Officers did not have to work and he passed his time doing calculus problems and macramé. Enlisted POWs at the camp were slave stevedores for Nippon Express (still in operation under the same name) at the Sakaide Rail Yards and the Port of Takamatsu. In September 1942, he was transferred to Tokyo 2B Kawasaki (Mitsui Madhouse). Again, as an officer, he was not required to work and did not participate in the slave stevedore work at the camp. However, he was the senior officer and thus was in charge of recording work hours and pay (most of which was never distributed). He was returned to Zentsuji in August of 1944. The camp was dismantled and he was sent in June 1945 to do subsistence farming at POW Camp 11-B Rokuroshi (Camp Mallette) in the Japanese Alps. With severely restricted rations, overcrowding, and no winter clothes, all the men at the camp were convinced that they would not survive the winter. Hidden in the mountains, the POW camp was not liberated until September 8, 1945. After the war, Schwartz remained in the Navy, retiring in 1962. In Hanford, California he was Public Works Director and City Engineer for 18 years.  Since retiring in 1980, Schwartz has been on many city and county work groups, including eight years as a City Planning Commissioner and five years on the Kings County Grand Jury.

POW#: 171

Darrell D. STARK, 91, lives in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. He grew up in a large migrant labor family in Oklahoma and joined the U.S. Army when he was 17 on March 5, 1941. He was assigned to the 31st Infantry Regiment United States, M company and was immediately sent to the Philippines Islands aboard the USAT Republic. He did his basic training on the Philippines where he was assigned to a heavy weapons company and was a weapons carrier and runner. With the Japanese invasion of The Philippines on December 8, 1941, the 31st Infantry covered the withdrawal of American and Filipino forces to the Bataan Peninsula. Despite starvation, disease, no supplies, obsolete weapons, and often dud ammunition, the peninsula’s defenders fought the Japanese to a standstill for four months. On April 9, 1942, Bataan was surrendered to Japan. At the time, Stark was delirious with malaria in Bataan Hospital #2. He did not participate in the 65-mile Bataan Death March and was instead transported by truck to Bilibid Prison in Manila. From there, he was eventually sent to Cabanatuan. Stark was soon sent to work in the Davao Penal Colony, a prison camp on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, where he and 2,000 other prisoners farmed 1,000 acres of rice and 600 acres of fruits and vegetables. Japan closed the camp on Mindanao in late spring of 1944. On July 4, 1944 Stark was sent to Japan with 1,024 Allied POWs aboard the Hellship Sekiho Maru (also known as the Canadian Inventor or the Mati Mati Maru or Wait, Wait Ship). After 62 days, and stops in Formosa and Japan, the freighter arrived at the Japanese port of Moji on September 1, 1944. From there, he was sent to Nagoya #5-B Yokkaichi POW camp where became a slave laborer at a copper foundry owned by Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha in Nagoya, a port city south of Tokyo. Much of the work involved melting down bells seized from churches. Other Allied POW slave laborers at this POW camp mined coal or manufactured sulfuric acid for the company. The Yokkaichi facility and company, Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha (ISK), where Stark slaved still exists. After an earthquake in May 1945, he was among the POWs moved to Nagoya-07B-Toyama to work as slave laborers for Nihon Sotatsu (Nippon Soda Company. Ltd.). He was liberated on September 5^, 1945. Stark returned to the United States and spent 18 months in a San Francisco hospital recovering from disease and injuries. According to Army records, roughly half of his regiment, 1,155 men, died in captivity. He moved to Connecticut working several jobs until he became Deputy Jailer for Tolland County. He went on to become a Captain with the State of Connecticut Department of Corrections, where he set up the Department’s Correctional Transportation Unit (CTU). Since his retirement in 1972, he has spoken widely to students about the history of the defense of the Philippines and to veterans who suffer, like him, from PTSD.

POW#:  563

Library of Congress Veterans History Project: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/bib/11216

National POW/MIA Recognition Day - 2014

Presidential Proclamation --- National POW/MIA Recognition Day, 2014

NATIONAL POW/MIA RECOGNITION DAY, 2014

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

America's history shines with patriots who have answered the call to serve.  From Minutemen who gathered on a green in Lexington to a great generation that faced down Communism and all those in our military today, their sacrifices have strengthened our Nation and helped secure more than two centuries of freedom.  As our Armed Forces defend our homeland from new threats in a changing world, we remain committed to a profound obligation that dates back to the earliest days of our founding -- the United States does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind.  On National POW/MIA Recognition Day, we express the solemn promise of a country and its people to our service members who have not returned home and their families:  you are not forgotten.

My Administration remains dedicated to accounting as fully as possible for our Nation's missing heroes, lost on battlefields where the sounds of war ceased decades ago and in countries where our troops are deployed today.  Whether they are gone for a day or for decades, their absence is felt.  They are missed during holidays and around dinner tables, and their loved ones bear this burden without closure.  Americans who gave their last full measure of devotion deserve to be buried with honor and dignity, and those who are still unaccounted for must be returned to their families.  We will never give up our search for them, and we will continue our work to secure the release of our citizens who are unjustly detained abroad.  Today, we acknowledge that we owe a profound debt of gratitude to all those who have given of themselves to protect our Union and our way of life, and we honor them by working to uphold this sacred trust.

On September 19, 2014, the stark black and white banner symbolizing America's Missing in Action and Prisoners of War will be flown over the White House; the United States Capitol; the Departments of State, Defense, and Veterans Affairs; the

Selective Service System Headquarters; the World War II Memorial; the Korean War Veterans Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; United States post offices; national cemeteries; and other locations across our country.  We raise this flag as a solemn reminder of our obligation to always remember the sacrifices made to defend our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim September 19, 2014, as National POW/MIA Recognition Day.  I urge all Americans to observe this day of honor and remembrance with appropriate ceremonies and activities. 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this  eighteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand fourteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-ninth.

BARACK OBAMA

Maywood Bataan Day, September 14

Float from first Maywood Day 1942

Maywood Bataan Day Organization

72nd Annual Maywood Bataan Day

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Veterans Memorial Park

 Maywood, Illinois

Musical program starts at 2:30pm 

Memorial Service begins at 3:00pm

with the massing of the Color Guard

US Navy Ceremonial Band Great Lakes

FLYER TO DOWNLOAD

The 15th Anniversary of the dedication of Veterans Memorial Park in Maywood and the 55th Anniversary of the dedication of the 192nd Tank Battalion Plaque at the old National Guard Armory originally located across the street from Proviso East High School on Madison Ave and now relocated to Veterans Memorial Park.

Singing of the American and Philippine National Anthems, as well as the always emotionally moving Monument Ceremony presented by the VietNow Color Guard DuPage Chapter. Our Keynote Speaker is Command Sergeant Major Mark W. Bowman, who is the Land Component CSM for the Illinois National Guard as well as a tanker himself. Guest speakers, including the Philippine Consul General in Chicago, Generoso D. G. Caonge, and Barry C. Cicero, Past Cmdr, First Division, American Legion Dept. of Illinois.

Rifle salute will be presented by the Howard H. Rohde American Legion Post #888from Northlake, Commander Al Pizzaro. And memorial wreaths will be presented by representatives of all branches of the US Military, as well as distinguished Filipino and other community guests.

And to mark the anniversaries of the dedication of Veterans Park, and the original 192nd Tank Battalion plaque, there will be dedicating a new plaque to replace the existing plaque.

Thank you to Home Depot Foundation in providing landscaping to Veterans Memorial Park and the labor ofHome Depot Store #1901 in Broadview, Illinois, for their efforts to install the new landscaping materials.

Half track tank on Bataan 1941

REMEMBERING

The members of the 33rd Tank Company, 33rd Infantry Division of the Illinois National Guard based at the Armory in Maywood, Illinois. In September 1940, the Draft Act had been passed and selected National Guard Units were called into active duty to prepare for the possibility of entering the war in Europe. The 33rd Tank Company was organized May 3, 1929 at Maywood, Illinois and was inducted into active Federal service as Company “B” of the 192nd Tank Battalion on November 25, 1940.

One 122 of these men left the Armory at Madison Street and Greenwood Avenue in Maywood to board a Northwestern Railroad train which took them to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where Company B joined Company A from Janesville, Wisconsin. Company C from Port Clinton, Ohio, and Company D from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, to form the 192nd Tank Battalion.

Bataan Death March April 1942

After further training and participating in Louisiana maneuvers, the 192nd Tankers were at Camp Polk, Louisiana, to be fully equipped for overseas shipping. In October of 1941, 89 men of the original Company “B” left the United States for the Philippine Islands. They arrived in Manila, Luzon, Philippine Islands on November 20, 1941 — Thanksgiving Day. From the port area, they went to Clark Field on Luzon, 60 miles to the north of Manila. On December 8, 1941, their battle began as they defended The Philippines from invading Imperial Army forces.

On April 9, they were surrendered and began nearly four years of indescribable hell: The infamous Bataan Death March, hellships, slave labor, torture, starvation, murder, and humiliation. Less than half the men would return home.

ORIGINS

Today’s Maywood Bataan Day Organization (MBDO) traces its roots back to the American Bataan Clan (ABC). This small group arose out of the anguish of mothers over the welfare of their sons who were lost when Bataan fell. After suffering through just over four months of promises of military and supply relief that was to be sent to the men fighting to slow or push back the invasion of Imperial Japan, these family members decided to take matters into their own hands.

Viola Heilig, mother of Sgt. Roger Heilig of Co. B of the 192nd Tank Battalion, was one of the founding mothers and also the first president. In the summer of 1942, the ABC registered itself as a charitable foundation and set about collecting the items that prisoners of war would need. They had food drives, collected clothing, and worked with the Red Cross to determine where to send the items. During the summer, little information came out about the fate of the captured troops, but some heavily censored letters from the prisoners confirmed that at least some of the men of the 192nd were still alive.

On the second weekend of September, 1942, the ABC helped sponsor an incredible weekend of celebrations of the American spirit just as America fully turned its efforts to the war effort. Recent victories in the Pacific theater of the war led some to believe that the tide was turning. A parade through the streets of Maywood that weekend featured hundreds of marching bands, floats, soldiers, and celebrities. Even Chicago Mayor Kelley was there. READ MORE

Contact the Maywood Bataan Day Organization for more information and to see their blog

Liberation Day

I was one of many who were in [Fukuoka, for Mistsui Mining] Camp 17 in Omuta, Japan on that exciting day, August 15, 1945. We went to the coal mine, but didm;t go down, instead we were brought back to camp. Then came call for all of us to go intro the mess hall where we were given a full Red Cross Box. At noon we were offered all the rice we wanted to eat, and at roll call at about 6PM our Japanese camp commander, Uri, drove onto the parade ground and, with all trucks surrounding us, with machine guns on top of the trucks, said to us.."Japan and the United States are now friends." and he and the trucks drove off leaving us standing there, free men. What a day to remember.
Lester Tenney # 264, Camp 17, barracks # 4, Bataan Death March survivor

Author, My Hitch In Hell: Memories of War

Guam - 70th Anniversary of Liberation Day

Fireside Chat at War in the Pacific National Historical Park,
July 19, 2014

On July 21, 1945 the first US Marines landed on the island of Guam. After nearly two and one-half years of brutal Japanese rule, liberation had begun. Liberated, not reoccupied, was how the survivors felt.

The Japanese invasion was December 10, 1941,  days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Renamed “Omiya Jima” (The Great Shrine Island), Guam became an important base for Japanese military operations. Most Americans were shipped to POW camps in Japan while some of the American women left behind were rumored to become Comfort Women. Chamorro men were pressed into forced labor, Comfort Women were imported, and Japanese Catholic priests were brought in to pacify the people.

In the last weeks of the war, survivors say that the Japanese abandoned all humanity. Beatings, beheadings, murders, and rapes--raw rage--confronted the people of Guam as the Japanese invaders desperately fought the Marines. Adding to the chaos, the American naval and aerial bombardment of Guam killed and maimed countless civilians.

The result is a lingering bitterness toward both the Japanese and Americans. There is a sense on the island that so much was sacrificed, but so little appreciated or recognized. For years, like the American POWs of the Japan, the people of Guam have asked for some sort of ex gratia payment for their unique suffering. As you can see from the recent news story on the demise of H.R. 44, Guam has been no more successful than the POWs.

Senate rejects Guam war claims
Jun. 20, 2014 Written by Steve Limtiaco
Pacific Daily News

U.S. citizens on Guam could get priority treatment when it comes to federal housing assistance, according to an Omnibus Territories bill approved yesterday by the U.S. Senate, but Guam Delegate Madeleine Bordallo expressed disappointment that the Senate once again rejected a provision to pay war claims to Guam.

According to Bordallo's office, four Republican senators: Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee; John Barrosso, of Wyoming; Mike Lee, of Utah; and Tim Scott, of South Carolina, removed Guam war claims from the bill, and also a provision that would have saved the local government as much as $500,000 in local matching funds for federal grants.

The Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee left those provisions intact in the bill it worked on, according to Bordallo's office, but they were removed before floor consideration by the full Senate because of objections raised by the four Republicans.

"I am extremely disappointed that H.R. 44 was removed from the Omnibus Territories Act that was passed by the U.S. Senate this evening," Bordallo said yesterday in a written statement. H.R. 44 is her latest war claims bill for Guam, introduced in January 2013, and included in the Omnibus Territories bill last summer.

It would tap federal section 30 funding for Guam -- income taxes paid by the island's federal employees -- to fund reparations for Guam residents who suffered during the Japanese occupation of the island during World War II. It called for payments of as much as $15,000, using an increase in section 30 money expected from the pending military buildup.

Guam is seeking reimbursement from the federal government and not Japan because the United States decades ago forgave Japan's war debts.

There is no official cost estimate for Guam war claims, but news files cite a figure as high as $80 million. That's less than half the cost of earlier reparations bills.

'Ideological grounds'

"Passing war claims has been a long standing issue for our community and has been an effort that Congressmen Won Pat, Blaz, and Underwood, and I have all worked to resolve. The latest version of the bill addressed every concern that has been raised by conservatives, and it would have had no impact on federal spending. Despite addressing each of these concerns, several U.S. Senators continue to object to this bill on ideological grounds and have fundamental objections with opening reparations for any group."

Congress came close to approving war claims in 2009, when the Senate offered to pay war claims, but only to survivors of the war, and not their descendants. Bordallo at the time rejected the offer, saying she wanted descendants to be paid as well.

Her war claims proposals have been rejected ever since.

According to Pacific Daily News files, critics of the reparations bill, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., remain influential and conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, are ready to challenge the measure if it advances.

Some Guam lawmakers in early 2013 opposed the idea of using section 30 funding for the payments, arguing Guam would be paying the debt with its own money.

They relented, however, after Bordallo said the measure had no chance of moving forward without a way to offset the federal government's costs. They passed a resolution supporting her bill.

"I will continue to work to find a resolution that finally recognizes loyalty of the people of Guam during World War II," Bordallo said yesterday.

"I will consult with the governor and the Legislature and on our remaining options to advance war claims I am committed to continuing our fight for war claims for our manamko' despite all the obstacles the conservative Republicans continue to raise."


WAR CLAIMS TIMELINE

• May 9, 2007: The Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act passes the House by a vote of 288-133. The bill now goes to the Senate for its consideration.

• April 17, 2008: The U.S. Senate attempts to pass the Guam war claims bill. The effort fails after Republican Sen. Jim DeMint from South Carolina objects to a motion for a unanimous consent.

• January 2009: Bordallo reintroduces the Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act as H.R. 44.

• February 2009: The House passes a $126 million bill to compensate Guam victims of the Japanese occupation of the island during World War II. The House sends the bill to the Senate for the second time. The House approves the same bill in 2007, only to see it stall in the Senate.

• June 26, 2009: Bordallo includes the war claims bill in the House version of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, saying the war reparations measure has a better chance of passing now.

• Oct. 7, 2009: A conference committee composed of House and Senate members decides not to include the measure in the defense bill. Bordallo rejects a compromise offered by the Senate "because it would not recognize all of those who endured Guam's occupation," she said.

• 2011 and 2012: Attempts to pass the measure fail.

• Jan. 4, 2013: Bordallo introduces another Guam war claims bill, which would tap the island's federal section 30 tax money related to the military buildup as a funding source.

• May 2013: Bordallo's war claims bill is incorporated in a House of Representatives Omnibus Territories bill.

• June 18, 2014: The Senate passes the Omnibus Territories bill, but removes the Guam war claims provisions.

Olympian, Airman, POW, Inspiration

On July 3rd, Louis Zamperini died. He had faced death many times as a young man. And defied the "odds" many more. As a POW of Japan he was beaten, starved, degraded, experimented upon, and dehumanized. It was with God's grace that he survived to be 97.

On this coming Christmas Day, the triumph and inspiration of his life will be released as a movie that is based on the still-best seller Unbroken. See below for the just released "unofficial" trailer.

It is hoped that the movie will inspire today's Japanese corporations that used and abused the POWs they requested from Imperial Japan's Army Ministry to finally acknowledge how they treated POWs and to offer an apology. Zamperini, as noted in the essay honoring him below, was tormented by Japanese corporate employees as much as by soldiers.

All the companies that allowed their employees to abuse Zamperini, such as the infamous Bird, to abuse their POW slave laborers still exist: Nippon Express, ShinEtsu Chemical, and Nippon Steel and Sumikin Stainless Corp. (NSSC, formerly Nippon Stainless). Although Bird was a military POW guard, his job was to ensure discipline for the company that used the camp's slave labor. It is likely that he was, like many guards and camp employees, paid by the company. As it was, the companies had already paid the War Ministry for the "white slaves" as they were called.

Farewell to America’s ‘Unbroken’ Hero
The Weekly Standard, July 9, 2014

by Dennis P. Halpin (A former Peace Corps volunteer in Korea and a former adviser on Asian affairs to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant to the Poblete Analysis Group)

America, just before its Fourth of July birthday, lost one of the greatest of the generation that guided it through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Louis Zamperini was 97, so this was not entirely surprising. Zamperini, the American who couldn’t be broken by Nazis in Berlin or sadistic guards in POW camps in Japan, had been designated to be the grand marshal of the 2015 Tournament of Roses parade. My grandfather, a World War I veteran, used to say “give me my roses while I’m alive.” Unfortunately, the Rose Parade organizing committee waited too long. (Zamperini will still be honored posthumously as grand marshal next New Year’s Day.)

“Lucky Louie,” as he called himself, was a rambunctious kid from an immigrant family, who learned to use his fists after being picked on in school for speaking the broken English he learned from his Italian father. He referred to himself in his memoirs as “a rebel with a chip on his shoulder,” sort of like one of those Hollywood “Little Rascals” for which his prewar generation was famous. After several run-ins with the Torrance, Calif., police and the local parish priest, Louie’s older brother Pete introduced him to athletic running as a means of focusing his energy. Louie began competing in track in what he referred to in his book Devil at My Heels as “the first wise decision of my life.”

The rest is history. The track record of “the Torrance Tornado” took him all the way to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and a handshake with Hitler himself. Louie did not medal—he said he was saving that for the anticipated 1940 Tokyo Olympics. (Zamperini, of course, made it to Japan, but only as a POW slave laborer.)

But Zamperini had run an astonishing 56 seconds in the final quarter mile of the 5,000 meter event in Berlin so the Fuehrer wanted to meet him. Goebbels brought Zamperini to Hitler who observed, “you’re the boy with the fast finish.” Louie said the American athletes in 1936 considered Hitler “only as a dangerous clown.”

Louie still had some of his rambunctious qualities because, on a tour of Berlin with a teammate, he decided that he wanted a swastika souvenir when they stopped in front of the Reich Chancellery to take photos. As they stood there Hitler again appeared with a contingent of armed guards and went inside. After the building’s guards had goose-stepped past, Louis made a run for the building, climbed a flag pole and grabbed a Nazi banner. The guards saw Zamperini as he attempted to make his escape, shouted “halt” and started firing. Louie wisely stopped and was handcuffed. However, upon seeing his Olympic uniform and hearing that he had wanted the swastika as a souvenir, the German commandant of the building let “Lucky Louie” keep the banner.

It was in the Pacific Theater where Louis Zamperini made his name as a war hero. Anticipating America’s entry into the war, he enlisted in the army in September 1941. He went to Officers Candidate and bombardier school in Midland, Texas. In October 1942 he was assigned as an Army Air Corps second lieutenant to Hickam Field in Honolulu with the B24 bombing unit of the Forty-second Squadron. His first raid took place on Christmas Eve, 1942, the target was Japanese-occupied Wake Island.

On May 26, 1943, in an aircraft dubbed the Green Hornet, which Zamperini noted “couldn’t fly straight,” he and his fellow crew members crash landed in the Pacific. His harrowing 47 days on the high seas, including near starvation (his weight dropped to 67 pounds), thirst, encounters with sharks, killing and eating raw sea birds, and the death at sea of a fellow crew member, are graphically recorded in Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption. That story will also be retold in a movie directed by Angelina Jolie which is to be released in December.

Zamperini and another crewmember, Second Lieutenant Russell Phillips, were captured by the Japanese and taken first to the island of Kwajalein and then to mainland Japan as POWs. His parents received a letter from President Franklin Roosevelt informing them that their son had “died in the service of his country” and that “he stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live.” His mother, however, never gave up hope that he was alive.

Louis Zamperini’s treatment as a brutalized prisoner of war continues to have relevance today because of the ongoing debate in Asia over Japan’s war crimes. Article 2 of the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War reads: “They must at all times be humanly treated and protected, particularly against acts of violence, insults and public curiosity. Measures of reprisal against them are prohibited.” The death rates of American POWs held by Nazi Germany and Japan during the Second World War provide a stark contrast. Statistics indicate that only 1,121 of 93,941 U.S. POWs died in Nazi internment camps (a rate of about 1.1 percent) while 13,851 of 36,260 POWs died while in Imperial Japanese custody (a rate of 38.2 percent.) This is evidence not only of abuse and brutality but of clear violations of the Geneva Convention by Imperial Japanese authorities.

Zamperini became aware of these violations from his first days of captivity on Kwajalein. A native islander, who worked for the Japanese, approached him in his cell because of his Olympic notoriety. This person informed him that the nine U.S. Marines who had left messages scrawled in Zamperini’s cell had been summarily executed, “decapitated with a samurai sword.” Zamperini described how his guards taunted him and his crewmate: “they jabbed us with sticks, spit on us, tossed hot tea in our faces. Sometimes they made us sing and dance—as if we could—for their amusement.” He also observed Comfort Women, the current focus of so much historic controversy, while imprisoned on Kwajalein. In his memoirs, he recorded: “on the way I passed two somber young girls, very out of place in a combat zone. They shuffled and stared at the ground.”

Later, on the prison ship transporting him to mainland Japan, guards examined Zamperini’s wallet. There they discovered a Stars and Stripes newspaper clipping regarding his Olympic background and his participation in the Wake Island raid. They were so angered that they broke his nose. He was transferred to a series of POW camps where he spent the next two years as a slave laborer. “Brutal beatings, with fist or club, were the daily rule,” he recorded.

Zamperini made a mental note of guards and officials who were especially brutal and sadistic in their treatment of the POWs. At Camp Ofuna, in the foothills near Yokohama [Kamakura], there was a medic named Kitamura, nicknamed “the Quack,” who sadistically beat POW Marine Bill Harris almost to death for concealing a map of Allied military advances. There was James Sasaki, who had attended USC with Louis Zamperini, undercover as a Japanese spy, and then returned to Japan to become the head interrogator for the prison camp system. Above all, there was Sergeant Matsuhiro Watanabe, who was assigned to Camp Omori, where Louis was transferred, and was nicknamed “the Bird.” Zamperini described him as “deranged, brutal beyond belief.” He took a personal dislike to “Lucky Louie” and tormented him both verbally and with great physical brutality.

“The Bird” disappeared near the war’s end and hid in the mountains of Japan for seven or eight years, until a general amnesty, to escape trial as a war criminal (Watanabe had been classified as a class-A war criminal, number 23 of the top 40 most wanted men, for his crimes against humanity.) When Louis returned to Japan in1998 to carry the torch for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, near the site of his final internment camp, he asked to meet with Watanabe, who had been located by journalists. Louis wanted closure and reconciliation but “the Bird,” in a final act of degradation, refused to meet with him. (Decades earlier, after hearing Reverend Billy Graham preach, Louie had met some of his other captors in Japan and had forgiven them all.)

At that last internment facility, Camp 4-B [Naoestu], near Nagano, where Louis Zamperini would return over a half century later, Louis and his fellow POWs were forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese corporations: “every day, gangs marched to the nearby steel mill, train yard and port. Although we had shoes, most of us walked the two miles to work barefoot in the March snow and ice, our feet wrapped in rags, because the Bird had a rule: whoever had dirty shoes got beaten and had to lick them clean.”

Two of the companies for which Louie and his fellow prisoners were forced to labor, Shinetsu Chemical and Nippon Stainless [NSSC], continue to exist today. A number of these corporations which used slave labor also continue to do business in the United States. As former POW Edward Jackfert pointed out in a recent article in the National Interest, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, and Mitsui, all of which used POW slave labor in their wartime factories, have sold rail cars which run on Virginia’s VRE rail line. Yet, unlike German corporations, which used slave labor, these corporations have never offered an apology to our old soldiers who are slowly fading away.

In 2000, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to a “multi-million pound compensation package” for former British prisoners of war in Japan in recognition of their “appalling” experiences—ex gratia payments from the UK government. As a result of Blair’s example, legislation was introduced in Congress which instead sought direct compensation for America’s POWs from Japanese corporations rather than from the U.S. taxpayer—the “Justice for the U.S. POWs Act of 2001”—with bipartisan sponsorship from two legislators from Louis Zamperini’s home state of California, Dana Rohrabacher and Mike Honda.

The bill was designed “to preserve certain actions in Federal court brought by members of the United States Armed Forces held as prisoners of war by Japan during World War II against Japanese nationals seeking compensation for mistreatment or failure to pay wages in connection with labor performed in Japan to the benefit of the Japanese nationals.” The legal bureau of the State Department, however, supported the Japanese government’s position that all such claims were settled by the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, so the proposed legislation got nowhere. There has thus been no formal U.S. recognition of the debt owed our POW slave laborers.

Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, did take an important step in offering his government’s first official apology in 2009 to survivors of the Bataan Death March at their organization’s final national convention in San Antonio, Texas. Ambassador Fujisaki stated, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News, "As former prime ministers of Japan have repeatedly stated: The Japanese people should bear in mind that we must look into the past to learn from the lessons of history. We extend a heartfelt apology for our country having caused tremendous damage and suffering to many people, including prisoners of war, those who have undergone tragic experiences in the Bataan Peninsula, in Corregidor Island in the Philippines and other places.” [NB: No official  text of this speech has ever been issued. The exact apology words used in Japanese are unknown.]

Perhaps the passing of the “Unbroken” Louis Zamperini will be an occasion for Japanese corporations involved in slave labor to join in extending their apologies to the dwindling number of America’s World War II POW veterans. Is saying sorry so hard? “Lucky Louie” certainly wouldn’t think so.