Rounding the bend past the guard gate, I catch my breath when I spy the Greenbrier resort’s main building. The Georgian-style structure, wedding-cake white and six stories high, looms above flower-speckled grounds that cover 7,000 acres and include cottages, five golf courses, tennis courts, and hiking and bridle trails. This posh estate was established in 1778 in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia (now West Virginia), around a natural hot spring (though the main building wasn’t built until 1858 and since has been expanded). Five presidents stayed here before the Civil War and famous guests since then have included President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and a whole roster of industrial barons—including Vanderbilts, Fords, and du Ponts—who regularly spent their summers here.

But one chapter of this majestic hotel’s history is lesser known—during World War II, diplomats from enemy Axis countries were interned here. And after they left, the hotel became an active wartime military hospital. There aren’t tons of artifacts left behind from those years, but you can discover traces of this fascinating history and hear some interesting stories. I’m here to learn about it from Dr. Robert S. Conte, who served as the Greenbrier’s historian for nearly 40 years. 

“Remember, Pearl Harbor was a big surprise,” Conte says as we sit at a big wooden desk in the Victorian Writing Room off the dramatic main lobby. I study the room’s gleaming wood trim, ornate mantel, and red carpeting, wondering what’s original and what’s not (only the wood trim, I later learn). “So, on December 7, there were pretty much fully functioning embassies in Washington,” which included those of Japan, Germany, and Italy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that these now-hostile diplomats and their families leave Washington within 48 hours for security reasons. The Greenbrier soon became a leading candidate to house the new adversaries. 

“The Greenbrier had several things going for it,” Conte explains. “It was on the railroad line—so get on a train in [D.C.’s] Union Station and you’re there within a few hours. It was isolated, and so could easily be guarded. And it was first-class,” which was imperative to ensure the reciprocal treatment of American diplomats being held overseas.

The State Department approached the Greenbrier’s management—it was owned by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad—on December 17, 1941, to propose a leasing plan. Within two days the resort closed to the public and the first group of 159 German and Hungarian diplomats and their families arrived on a secretly scheduled Pullman train from Washington. “They pulled up in the same train station that still exists across the street,” Conte says. Eventually 1,697 people from five different countries were interned here.

The plan was to keep the diplomats at the Greenbrier for up to eight weeks while prisoner negotiations between Washington and the enemy countries ensued. From the start, all internees were treated as regular guests (other than the presence of 50 U.S. Border Control guards keeping an eye on them), with the staff  of several hundred and quality of the resort’s service remaining unchanged. General Manager Loren Johnston ensured this, even though some employees may have wrestled with the idea of serving the enemy. “You may rest assured,” Johnston wrote his staff, “that our Government has a very good reason for everything they request us to do.… It is our duty to serve these people for the duration of their stay in the best possible manner.”

While the golf course and riding trails were off-limits for security reasons, the internees could roam the building and grounds, use the indoor swimming pool, play ping-pong in the main lobby, and shop in the lower-level stores. The Germans bought so much they needed two extra railcars when they left.

For the most part, the imprisoned guests were well-mannered, though one night the Germans celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the main dining room. “It got a little boisterous,” Conte says. “One of the staff said, ‘It’s a hell of a hail of heils.’” 

The Germans and Italians notoriously didn’t get along. “Of course, the Germans thought everyone was inferior,” Conte says. “There was tension.” So around April 1942, the Italians were moved to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and Japanese diplomats, who had been interned at the nearby Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, were transferred to the Greenbrier.

But the Germans and Japanese got along even worse, leading to conflicts that tested the staff’s patience. In another note, GM Johnston appealed to his employees once again: “It must be remembered that this country is in a grievous war…and in order that we may properly perform our service we must…do our full duty.”

At long last, behind-the-scenes negotiations in Washington paid off with a prisoner exchange involving neutral countries, including Mozambique, Portugal, and Sweden. The last diplomat left the Greenbrier on July 9, 1942, and the resort reopened to the public.

Even before the last internee left, however, management was in negotiations for the Greenbrier’s next wartime duty. The U.S. Army wanted to use the main building as a hospital, and soon purchased the property for $3.3 million, well below the market value at the time. And so, on August 31, 1942, after a short, six-week summer season, the resort closed its heavy glass doors once again and began the challenging task of transforming itself from a resort–cum–internment–camp into a military hospital, to the tune of $2.2 million in renovation costs.

“This hospital is a major story,” Conte says. Originally, army officials planned to knock down all the interior walls, but former Greenbrier managers hired by the army reminded them that someday it would be a hotel again. “They figured out a plan where they could use the existing 500 guest rooms, converting them to hold 2,000 beds,” Conte says, though some walls needed to be razed to make room for a surgical area. The elegant lobby level remained more or less the same, except for an elevator shaft added off the ballroom for wheelchairs and gurneys.

Conte leads me through the richly decorated lobby-level rooms (courtesy of New York designer Dorothy Draper after the war), pointing out pieces of centuries-old furniture and vintage lithographs. The North Parlor was converted into a chapel, he says; the enormous crystal chandelier is original—and, according to one story, one of the Japanese internees left behind the gigantic Chinese screens that grace one wall. We walk onto the balcony just outside, overlooking the back of the hotel. A guard tower once rose above the fields in the distance.

The hospital’s first soldiers arrived on November 14, 1942, and over the next three years, more casualties came from Europe, North Africa, the Aleutian Islands, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the Pacific Theater. “For a lot of G.I.s, it was like, ‘Holy mackerel,’” Conte says of the soldiers’ response to their first view of the refined setting. “Clearly, when you see the building, you know it’s no army hospital. When you walked in, there was carpeting and wallpaper and, at the beginning, white tablecloths on the dining tables.” 

The hospital wasn’t formally dedicated until October 16, 1943, when it was given the official name Ashford General Hospital—after U.S. Army doctor Colonel Bailey K. Ashford, known for his early 20th-century malaria research. The press, however, dubbed it the “Shangri-La for Wounded Soldiers,” given the fact that G.I.s could use the resort’s championship golf course and other facilities. 

Between 1942 and 1946, 24,148 soldiers were admitted, and 11,346 operations performed. “They did vascular and neurosurgery here,” Conte says, “as well as rehabilitation.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed twice at Ashford mid-war for some R&R, and was admitted as a patient once in late 1945 (for pneumonia, Conte believes). 

One big issue the military confronted was how to run such an enormous operation during a national labor shortage. Their solution? Build a prisoner-of-war camp at a nearby former Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Seventy-two Quonset huts housed 1,000 POWs, first Italians and then Germans, who had been captured overseas. They cooked meals, took care of the grounds, did laundry, and ran errands, among other tasks.

The last patients left in 1946, and so did the POWs. With the free labor gone, the military sold the Greenbrier back to the C&O. That, however, wasn’t the end of the Greenbrier’s military duties. Ten years later, the government was looking for a site for an emergency relocation center for the U.S. Congress in case of nuclear war.  “Another interesting story!” Dr. Conte says—but not one for today. 

In spring 1942, Japan’s military was the virtual master of its area of operations. It had overrun most of Southeast Asia and a huge swathe of the western Pacific with startling speed after Dec. 7, 1941, and the campaigns in mainland China seemed well in hand. The Dutch and French colonial territories had fallen to the Japanese, as had the British territories of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and besieged United States forces in the Philippines were on the verge of defeat. The Empire of Japan was ascendant. The imperial government assured its people that Japan’s Home Islands were safe from retaliatory attacks by any of the Allied powers.

That assurance was shattered at noon on April 18, 1942 when 16 B-25B Mitchell bombers, launched from the US Navy aircraft carrier Hornet, roared in over the island of Honshu, vectoring in from different points of the compass. It was a hit-and-run attack. After dropping their bomb loads on Tokyo and five other cities, the American aircraft made for the Chinese mainland, where all but one ditched or crash-landed. 

The Enemy Airmen’s Act

In terms of battle damage assessment, the Doolittle Raid did not accomplish much physical damage to high-value military targets, but the psychological effects of the mission were tremendous. It provided a major boost to American morale, both in the military and on the home front, and it shocked the Japanese out of their illusions of invulnerability.

The attack also provoked two Japanese reactions of far-reaching consequences that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, most of whom had nothing to do with the raid. 

A month after Doolittle’s strike, the Japanese army launched the Zhejiang–Jiangxi Campaign, a reprisal operation against Chinese who had assisted Doolittle’s aircrews. The campaign also sought to deny Allied access to China’s eastern provinces, either as a launching point or escape route. Japanese forces killed more than 10,000 Chinese civilians in direct retaliation for the air raid on the home island. In the four months of the punitive operation (May–September 1942) as many as 250,000 civilians were slaughtered. 

While that death toll mounted, the Japanese government drafted official policies specifically aimed at Allied aircrews who carried out aerial attacks against Japanese targets—past, present, or future. In July 1942, the War Ministry issued Military Secret Order 2190, which stated: “An enemy warplane crew who did not violate wartime international law, shall be treated as prisoners of war, and one who acted against the said law shall be punished as a wartime capital crime.”

The wording of that directive seemed straightforward enough, citing international laws of war as the determiner of what was lawful conduct and what was criminal. However, it quickly became clear that the Japanese applied a questionable interpretation on what constituted “criminal” conduct by enemy aviators. 

Expediting executions

On Aug. 13, 1942, Gen. Shunroku Hata, the Supreme Commander of the Japanese Forces in China, issued Military Order No. 4, an edict that later became infamous as the Enemy Airmen’s Act. The four sections of the order specified that “bombing, strafing, and otherwise attacking” civilians, private properties, or non-military targets was a crime punishable by death. While the language of the order seemingly allowed for contingencies, allowing for cases where “such an act is unavoidable” (as extant international laws of war had already determined), the Japanese chose to interpret every attack against targets in their sphere as criminal instead of as acts of legitimate warfare.

The Enemy Airmen’s Act was also an ex post facto order since it stated, “This military law shall be applicable to all acts committed prior to the date of its approval.” That provision was specifically aimed at the American airmen who had flown in the Doolittle Raid.

Eight of Doolittle’s aviators fell into Japanese hands in China. They were tried by a Japanese military tribunal in a cursory trial where they were all sentenced to death, even before Military Secret Order 2190 was issued. When the Assistant Chief of Staff of Imperial Army Headquarters sent Order 2190 to Japanese forces in China, he amended a memorandum which stated, “concerning the disposition of the captured enemy airmen, request that action be deferred… pending proclamation of the military law and its official announcement, and the scheduling of the date of execution of the American airmen.”

The Doolittle Raiders

The condemned aviators were moved to Tokyo. The sentences of five were commuted to life imprisonment. The other three men—1st Lt. Dean Hallmark, 1st Lt. William Farrow, and Sgt. Harold Spatz—were executed on Oct. 15, 1942. The U.S. government knew about the executions during the war, but U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suppressed the information. The Allies initiated a postwar investigation for a war crimes prosecution against the Japanese officers who conducted the trial of the Doolittle aviators. 

The Enemy Airmen’s Act was the template for subsequent edicts that the Japanese enacted against captured Allied aircrews, especially as American air raids against the Home Islands escalated in intensity and destructiveness. Between 1944 and the signing of Japan’s surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, as many as 132 Allied airmen were convicted by the Japanese in summary courts-martial, condemned to death as criminals and executed. At Fukuoka, 15 captured airmen were executed after Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of impending surrender.

This was the culmination of a practice repeated throughout the war, as the Japanese subjected captured Allied airmen to interrogations that used torture to extract confessions (usually written in Japanese without English translation), summary trials, and execution by firing squad or beheading. Yet even that perfunctory process was not enough for some senior Japanese officials.

Near the end of the war, the Commandant of the Military Police in Japan wrote an official memorandum to his subordinate commanders complaining that those field expedient trials, hasty as they were, unnecessarily delayed the executions of enemy airmen prisoners. As a direct result of that complaint, at least 90 American aviators were executed in the last weeks of the war. 

War Crimes Tribunals

After the war, Allied war crimes tribunals targeted Japanese personnel involved in the deaths of captured aviators. Senior military officers under whose authority the trials and executions of airmen were conducted were obvious targets for prosecution, but so too were rank-and-file Japanese soldiers personally implicated in the abuse and murder of prisoners of war.

Tsuchiya Tatsuo, a prison camp guard, was tried as a Class A war criminal and charged with eight specifications of torture and cruelty to prisoners. In particular Tsuchiya was accused of the prolonged torture of a prisoner named Robert Gorden Teas. Eight witnesses swore out affidavits detailing how Tsuchiya beat Teas to death over a period of five days. In December 1945, Tsuchiya was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.

In July 1946 a US Military Commission tried Lt. Gen. Harukei Isayama, former commander of the Japanese Formosan Army, along with seven of his subordinates. The charge against Isayama was that he “did permit, authorize and direct an illegal, unfair, unwarranted and false trial” of American prisoners of war, and that he then ordered a Japanese Military Tribunal to sentence those prisoners to death and ordered the carrying out of the executions. The American court charged Isayama for war crimes involving 14 American aviators shot down and captured between Oct. 12, 1944, and Feb. 27, 1945.

The earlier date was critical, because that was when the Japanese had implemented the Formosa Military Law—an edict repeating the dictates of the Enemy Airmen’s Act but applying specifically to all airmen captured within the jurisdiction of the Japanese 10th Area Army.

The Formosa Military Law declared that “the severest punishment” would be applied to enemy airmen who bombed or strafed objectives of a non-military nature, who “disregarded human rights and carried out inhuman acts,” or who entered 10th Area Army’s jurisdiction with any intent of committing such acts. All 14 trials were completed in a single day. No defense was allowed. The defendants were not permitted to speak on their own behalf. Afterwards the 14 airmen were shot and buried in a ditch on the morning of June 19, 1945.

Bombings in China

Isayama’s defense counsel (an American jurist) argued that because senior officials in Tokyo had approved the use of death penalty in the summary trials of the 14 American POWs, Isayama’s tribunal had no choice but to sentence the airmen to death. Isayama himself, his attorney insisted, was required to order capital sentences to be carried out.

The American Military Commission found the argument unconvincing. Isayama and his co-defendants were all found guilty. The Chief of the Japanese Judicial Division and the military intelligence officer who oversaw the interrogations and torture of the POWs were both sentenced to death. Both sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment. Isayama and the others received prison sentences ranging from 20 years to life.

Aside from the fact that the Japanese treatment of enemy airmen was a clear violation of extant international military law, it was also a colossal hypocrisy. Beginning in 1937 with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military had repeatedly targeted Chinese cities with the deliberate intent of terrorizing and murdering the Chinese population. From August to December 1937, Japanese bombing raids hammered Nanjing, targeting power plants, water works, and even the city’s Central Hospital. Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing were bombed numerous times. In Chongqing alone, more than 10,000 Chinese civilians were killed in at least 268 separate Japanese air raids. In a direct connection to the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese flew 1,131 bombing attacks against Chuchow—Doolittle’s intended destination—killing 10,246 people in that city alone. 

In the Second World War, every major power conducted aerial attacks on its enemy’s civilian population. No nation could claim complete innocence of that. However, the Japanese implementation of the Enemy Airmen’s Act was war crime compounded upon war crime.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Harry Doe started keeping a diary in January 1944. It was going to be a monumental year and the 21-year-old Canadian wanted a record for posterity. 

Harry’s elder brother, Robert, had enlisted in the navy, but there was only one branch of service for Harry—the Royal Canadian Air Force. His father had been a pilot in the First World War, and Doe had grown up obsessed with aircraft. As an adolescent, he had been a talented model-maker and won several competitions with his creations. He joined the air force in 1941 at the age of 18 as a mechanic and the following year he was sent to Edmonton, Alberta, for aircrew training. After completing the technical training school, Doe started air observer’s school and in August 1943 he was commissioned as pilot observer and awarded his navigation wings.

Soon afterward, Doe shipped out to Britain for first posting to the Advanced Flying Unit, Royal Air Force Wigtown, in the southwest of Scotland. He arrived at the start of 1944. It was cold and wet, but Doe didn’t care. He was leading the life he had dreamed about for years. At the front of his diary Doe penned a brief poem:

If I should die
and you bury me
And send my things
across the sea,
One favor, ere
you let me be
Please burn this
ruddy diary.

Doe spent the first fortnight of 1944 flying, sleeping and drinking. It was a good life, but one that didn’t leave much time to commit his innermost thoughts to his diary. Rather than record his emotions, Doe simply noted his activities. On January 10 he took the train south to his new station, RAF Chipping Warden, which was in Oxfordshire, 75 miles northwest of London. Shortly afterward, at a mess dinner, Doe hit it off with a fellow Canadian named Harold Sherman Peabody, or Al, as he preferred.

In fact, Peabody, whom Doe described in his diary as a “good type,” had been born in 1920 not in Canada but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father worked for the Canada Life insurance company. He was a baby when the family relocated to Quebec. At Bishop’s University in Quebec, the handsome Peabody had been a star athlete on the golf and hockey teams before he quit his studies to enroll in the Commonwealth’s flight-training program in Windsor Mills, Quebec. Sport helped Peabody bond with Doe as the two young men drank their beer in the mess. Doe had been a talented footballer and boxer at high school, where he had won the lightweight title in the Greater Victoria Schoolboy Boxing Competition.

It ended up being a raucous night. By the end, the officers were climbing the rafters, yelling and hollering in drunken ecstasy. “Very stiff,” Doe noted in his diary the next day.

The following weeks were mundane. Most of the time was spent in the classroom, but gradually a crew began to form. “Got a gunner—Buckley,” wrote Doe in his diary on January 20. Sergeant Percy Buckley was a streetwise 18-year-old from London, a likeable fellow whom Doe and Peabody invited to be their rear gunner. 

By the beginning of February they had a bomb-aimer, Flying Officer Lew Fiddick. Born in British Columbia, Fiddick was an outdoorsman who had been working as a logger in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, when war was declared. Fiddick was 27 and had a quiet maturity that impressed Peabody. Not an educated man in the academic sense, he nonetheless was sharp and intelligent, the sort of man on whom one could rely.  Fiddick, Peabody and Doe shared a hut when they moved into their new base at RAF Edgehill in mid-February.

They were flying regularly by this point and Doe was mastering the skills particular to his job as navigator. He attended lectures about astronavigation, practiced on dead-reckoning instruments and, most difficult of all, became familiar with Gee, a radio navigation system developed in the late 1930s that triangulated position based on the time delay between two separate transmitters.

Fortunately for Doe there was plenty of light relief to be had at RAF Edgehill. “Went to Policemen’s Dance in Banbury with Al and Lew,” he wrote in his diary on February 23. “Quite drunk.” The next day he flew despite having a “splitting headache.”

When his training period at RAF Edgehill ended on March 25, Doe spent an extended leave in London, taking in shows and taking out girls. His leave ended the second week of April but it wasn’t until the end of May that he was posted to the Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Feltwell in Norfolk in the east of England. This was the last step before he became operational. That day arrived on an auspicious date: June 6. “INVASION,” wrote Doe in capital letters in his diary, adding: “Posted to 622 SQN. Bit of a piss-up.”

No. 622 Squadron had been formed the previous year and was based at RAF Mildenhall, also on the eastern side of England. It had first flown Stirling Mk III bombers but since December the crews had been re-equipped with Lancaster Mk IIIs and operated as part of No. 3 Group in RAF Bomber Command’s main force. 

Doe flew his first combat missions on June 23, a daylight attack on a V-2 rocket site near St.-Omer in northern France. His third mission took place on June 30 when the RAF launched a daylight raid on German positions in Villers-Bocage in Normandy. The town, 20 miles inland from the invasion beaches, had been the scene of fierce fighting since the British launched Operation Epsom on June 26 to continue the offensive into France. Doe’s Lancaster was one of nearly 250 RAF bombers that flattened Villers-Bocage; it didn’t lead to a decisive British victory but it helped inflict damage on the Germans from which they never recovered. 

The relief for Doe on returning safely to base after that mission was particularly acute because the next morning, July 1, he embarked on an extended leave, the first five days of which dovetailed with his brother’s furlough from the navy. The two Doe brothers spent the time in London in the company of some delightful Red Cross girls.

Doe’s leave ended on July 10 and for the next week he was on standby. On July 17 he was recalled from a daylight raid shortly before take-off for a reason that Doe didn’t explain in his diary. The next day the squadron bombed Caen in a daylight raid. On July 20 the target was the town of Homberg, the first time Doe had flown a mission over Germany. On July 23 he flew a night raid on Kiel and the following evening the target was Stuttgart in southwest Germany. 

The mission for July 27 was scrubbed, so Doe and the rest of the crew went to a show instead. By now they were connected by a strong bond. Doe, Peabody and Fiddick had become friends as well as comrades, and Percy Buckley was also a valued member of the crew. Another Briton in the crew, 29-year-old Arthur Payton, was a competent wireless operator and the only married man among them. He had wed in the summer of 1939, shortly before he resigned from his job as a steelworker to volunteer for the RAF. The upper gunner was 21-year-old Richard Proulx from Ontario. Like Payton, he had flown several missions with Peabody. The flight engineer was Sergeant David Cosgrove.

On July 28, Cosgrove was sick, so Lieutenant George Wishart took his place for a mission to Stuttgart that night. He was an experienced man to have as a late substitute. Born in London to Scottish parents, Wishart had joined the RAF at the age of 21 in 1935 and had been commissioned in May 1943. 

Like the rest of the crew, Wishart was unfamiliar with the aircraft they would fly that night. The crews were not assigned to specific aircraft; instead, they flew the airplanes that were available at the time. None of them had flown in Lancaster L7576 before, but it had a legendary status within the squadron. Having survived 98 missions, it was considered a lucky “crate.” At 10:00 on the evening of July 28 Lancaster L7576 lifted off with payload of five 1,000-pound bombs and two 500-pounders, all of which were to be dropped over Stuttgart’s railway yards. 

There are approximately 500 miles between RAF Mildenhall and Stuttgart, a route that took the 500 RAF aircraft south over eastern France. Sixty-two of the aircraft failed to return. Lancaster L7576 was one of them.

At approximately 1:25 on the morning of July 29, Walter Swoboda picked up his prey on the radar of his Messerschmitt 110G-4, the latest model of the twin-engine fighter-bomber. The Messerschmitt was a feared night fighter, equipped with Lichtenstein radar that enabled it to latch onto enemy aircraft in the darkness. But the 22-year-old Swoboda was a relatively inexperienced pilot with no victories. The first burst of cannon fire he shot at his target went wide of its mark. Surprise was no longer on the German’s side. The Canadian pilot put his aircraft into a “corkscrew,” flipping the bomber onto its side and diving for a few hundred feet before ascending. Swoboda had been taught about this defensive maneuver and pumped fire into the Lancaster as it came slowly out of its dive. “Almost immediately as we levelled off we were hit,” said Lew Fiddick. “I still remember the bullets hitting the aeroplane—just a steady stream.”

The fire from the Me-110 ripped through the Lancaster, killing Percy Buckley in the rear turret, Richard Proulx in the upper turret and wireless operator Arthur Payton. Bullets also shot away the tail control, crippling the aircraft. Fiddick squeezed out of the forward turret and met engineer George Wishart, who had come down from above, in the nose section. Both knew the aircraft was doomed. Wishart yanked the release handle of the escape hatch and plunged through the hole into the darkness. Fiddick was about to follow when he thought of Peabody and Doe in the cockpit. They were his buddies. He had to see if he could help. He crawled toward the cockpit, but the Lancaster was in its death throes. He felt a series of violent shudders and then a massive jolt hurled Fiddick backwards and through the escape hatch. “The next thing I knew I was falling through the air,” he remembered.

Fiddick crashed through saplings as he fell to earth beneath his parachute. His leg hurt and his senses were still scrambled but he had the wherewithal to bury his parachute and Mae West. He suspected he had come down in northeastern France but did not know where. He decided to limp south. Not long after daylight on July 29 he spotted the village of Cirey-sur-Vezouze. For two days he hid in the undergrowth, observing the villagers and wondering whether it would be safe to approach them. Like all aircrews, he had been briefed that this rugged and thickly forested region had a particular history. Germany and France had fought over it for 75 years and it had changed hands on several occasions; as a result a minority of inhabitants had German ties and was loyal to the Fatherland. 

Ultimately, hunger got the better of Fiddick and he hobbled into Cirey-sur-Vezouze. “I finally knocked at a house and the people took me in and fed me,” he said.

The villagers were aware that an aircraft had come down. One, 17-year-old Pierre Vinot, the son of a forest ranger, had arrived at the crash site on the morning of July 29. The Germans had beaten him to it, however, and were sifting through the wreckage. “I saw two dead—they were all in one piece—and another one who was dismembered,” Vinot remembered. “Dogs were eating this third man.” The Germans allowed the locals to remove the dead and bury them in the churchyard of Petitmont. The Germans then began scouring the countryside for the remaining crew members.

Fiddick was passed into the care of Leonard Barassi, a 44-year-old Italian who had lived in the region for years and was loosely involved with the resistance effort. He sheltered the Canadian for a few days until “on the afternoon of August 4 a member of the Maquis came and took me to the Maquis camp.”

The Maquis were the guerrillas of the French Resistance and Fiddick remained with them in their forest hideout for nearly two weeks. Then, on August 15, the Maquis handed him over to Captain Henry Druce, the officer in charge of 13 British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, an elite regiment that had been waging a guerrilla campaign against the Germans in Occupied France since early June. Druce’s section was the advance party for a larger operation codenamed Loyton, with the mission of harrying the Nazis in conjunction with the local Maquis as the Germans withdrew east ahead of the advancing U.S. Third Army.  “A Canadian pilot called Fiddick joined us,” Druce wrote in his operational log. “He had been shot down and had injured his leg, which made walking difficult.” For his part, Fiddick was relieved to be “finally among people I could understand!”

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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In December 2003 I traveled to Vancouver Island to meet Lew Fiddick and Henry Druce for a book I was writing about the SAS. Fiddick had been made an honorary member of Druce’s regiment for his exploits during Operation Loyton. He had proven to be a born guerrilla fighter, one of Druce’s most reliable men during the weeks behind enemy lines. “Having grown up on Vancouver Island, the forest was an environment in which I felt comfortable,” he told me. “I took to the SAS type of warfare quite quickly and it was interesting work.” 

Fiddick provided the SAS with crucial skills they didn’t possess. During one of their frequent nighttime resupplies by the RAF, the SAS took Fiddick to the selected drop zone. “He was able to tell from the sound of the engine whether an aircraft belonged to the enemy or the Allies,” remembered SAS Captain John Hislop. “This was a help, as several of the planes to pass over the D.Z. had been German ones. He identified this one as British, and when it was directly overhead we gave the signal. It was answered correctly from the plane, which then wheeled round for the run-in.”

When Fiddick returned to England in October 1944 he told the RAF that, as far as he was aware, only he and Wishart had bailed out of the Lancaster. (Wishart had been badly injured on landing and was found by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war as a POW and remained in the RAF post-war.) However, Fiddick did relay to the RAF’s Missing Research and Enquiry Service (MRES) what he had been told by the Maquis—that two airmen had been spotted close to where the Lancaster came down. But that was where the trail of Doe and Peabody went cold.

An MRES team visited the crash site in 1947 but could not determine what had happened to the two missing airmen. They wrote in their report that Doe and Peabody “either drifted over the then German border during their parachute descent and were apprehended there, or were still in the aircraft when it exploded and were blown to pieces.”

But if the two men had been apprehended by the Germans, why had they disappeared off the face of the earth? The mystery remained unsolved when Fiddick died in 2016 in his 100th year; but the puzzle was already in the process of being pieced together.

Canadian brothers Jon and Robert Peck provided the impetus for the investigation of Lancaster L7576. Their late mother had been Al Peabody’s second cousin and in 2016 they launched the Peabody Project to try and discover what happened to Al and his buddy Harry Doe. They enlisted the help of Bishop’s University, where Al Peabody had made such an impression 75 years earlier. Three undergrad students there threw themselves into the search for answers. Rick Doe, Harry’s nephew, passed over to the students what he had in his possession, including Harry’s diary from 1944 and his flight log.

The students’ diligence paid off. Among the piles of documents they sifted through were files from the British army’s War Crime Investigations Team. The team had been particularly active in northeastern France because 29 SAS soldiers of Operation Loyton had, like Doe and Peabody, vanished there during the war. Major Eric Barkworth, a tenacious and astute detective who had tracked down dozens of Nazis in the months after the war, had led the SAS investigation. He determined that the captured SAS soldiers had all been executed over the course of several weeks, some individually but most often in small groups. At some point before being murdered, most of the SAS prisoners had passed through a prisoner transit camp called Schirmeck, three miles from Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi death camp in France. 

Barkworth also ascertained that three airmen had been executed at Natzweiler, one of whom was Sergeant Fredric Habgood, a British member of a Lancaster that had been shot down on the same night as L7576. Habgood was hanged on July 31 and his corpse incinerated in the camp’s oven. It had not been possible to identity the other two airmen who had been killed at Natzweiler but a Nazi guard identified Peabody as one from a photograph. In his report on the deaths of the two airmen, who were “wearing combination overalls of a lighter shade than battledress khaki, fitted with zip fasteners on front,” Barkworth said it was “possible” they were from L7576. It is now almost certain that Peabody and Doe were indeed the mystery airmen, since there were no other unaccounted Allied aircrew who had bailed out at that time in the region.

Seventy-five years later a memorial was unveiled near the site of the Lancaster’s crash. Military and diplomatic dignitaries from France and Great Britain attended, as did relatives of the crew who traveled from their homes in Ireland, California, Quebec and British Columbia. Among them was Rick Doe, there to remember his uncle Harry, who in jest had written three quarters of a century earlier that in the event of his death his “ruddy diary” should be burned. Thankfully it wasn’t, and today it stands as a testament to a brave young man whose luck ran out on the 99th flight of Lancaster 7576.  

Gavin Mortimer is a British historian who has written extensively about World War II special forces. His latest book is David Stirling: the Phoney Major, which was published in the U.S. in August 2022.

What Happened to Walter Swoboda?

The shootdown of Lancaster L7576 was Leutnant Walter Swoboda’s first victory. It was also his last. Sometime in July 1944 Swoboda, an Austrian, transferred from the 2nd to the 6th Staffel of Nachtjagdgeschwader 6. On the night December 17-18, 1944, his Me-110G-4 went missing, apparently after being hit by anti-aircraft fire from the U.S. Army 204th Field Artillery near Felsberg. The remains of Swoboda and his crewmen, Unteroffiziere Ernst Meier and Franz Dinger, were never found. —Jon Guttman

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Why should anyone read a reprint, especially one that originally came out over 22 years ago?

For CNN correspondent Chloe Melas and her mother, Elizabeth Murphy, that answer comes readily.

“It’s not just somebody who’s going to like military history that reads ‘Luck of the Draw,’” Melas told HistoryNet. “It’s really a great page turner. It’s a personal story about this one man’s account.”

That one man’s record just happens to be her grandfather’s, Frank Murphy, who was a B-17 navigator within the “Bloody” 100th Bomb Group, one of five B-17 bomb groups sent to England in the spring of 1943 to form the new 4th Bomber Wing.

Luck of the Draw

by Frank Murphy, Griffin, February 28, 2023

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“It lasted only four months — four months, however, in which were compressed many of the most exciting, and all of the most frightening and life-threatening, experiences I have known in my entire life,” Frank Murphy wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Luck of the Draw.”

Along the same ilk as “Helmet for My Pillow” or “With the Old Breed,” Murphy’s account will soon be on the silver screen with Apple TV+’s “Masters of the Air.”

Based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name, “Masters of the Air” is expected to follow American bomber pilots and crewmen of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, who, on a daily basis, risked flying at 25,000 feet in frigid temperatures — in broad daylight — to bring the fight to Hitler’s doorstep.

Among those men is Murphy, who will be featured in the series and played by actor Jonas Moore.

“Masters of the Air,” the third installment of the trilogy that includes “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” reunites Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as well as “Band of Brothers” writer John Orloff, who also served as a consultant on “The Pacific.”

The Eighth’s effort to pry Europe from the claws of the Third Reich — one that included unleashing 697,000 tons of bombs — proved to be overwhelmingly costly. By war’s end, over 47,000 of the 115,000 U.S. Army Air Force casualties were from the Eighth.

“The Eighth Air Force was one of the great fighting forces in the history of warfare,” famed war correspondent Andy Rooney once wrote.

“It had the best equipment and the best men, all but a handful of whom were civilian Americans, educated and willing to fight for their country and a cause they understood was in danger — freedom. It’s what made World War II special.”

In “Luck of the Draw,” Murphy details what essentially amounted to flying in a frigid tin can, flying over 126 hours over occupied Europe before being shot down over Regensberg during what was later known in the U.S. Army Air Force as “Black Week” (October 8-14, 1943).

Murphy later describes the missions as “a staccato succession of trials by fire on a scale unprecedented in aerial warfare.” 

Arrested by German police, “Murphy shares the highs and lows of his internment in the infamous Stalag Luft III, later made famous by the Hollywood feature, ‘The Great Escape.’  The men survived freezing conditions, near-starvation and a last-minute forced march as the Russian Army approached. He was liberated on April 29, 1945,” according to the press release.

“My dad would never have considered himself a hero, he would have always just said he was just an ordinary young man — which he was. For me, it just made me realize, I mean, he’s always going to be my hero, but also how much grit and will to live he possessed,” Elizabeth Murphy told HistoryNet.

“He had marched through the snow using newspaper on their feet. He had these old wooden shoes that he bartered to help him survive. It’s a miracle that he did because when he was released he was very sick. He had pneumonia. He was skin and bones. It’s amazing he survived. Thank God, he survived.”

For the mother and granddaughter duo, however, their recollections differ. For Elizabeth, the details of her father’s personal fight during World War II were never fully told.

For Melas, the opposite.

“The stories that I heard about his time in World War II were told at the dinner table and were told on weekends when I spent the night at my grandparents’ house.”

Melas continued, “I didn’t really understand what he truly went through until I was in college when I got this really deep longing to want to connect to him more.”

That desire continued to grow, even after the passing of Murphy in 2007.

For the past several years, Melas has spearheaded the push to republish her grandfather’s memoir, telling HistoryNet “I said to my family and my grandmother, we really need to publish grandfather’s book. It was pretty much self-published; it came out with a small publisher called FNP. The man who published it, by the name of John O’Neill, was also in the Eighth Air Force, although not the 100. [O’Neill] published food and nutrition books, but what he offered was basically a step up from self-publishing. Nobody really got their hands on it other than people really in that specific community.”

Now, thanks in part to Melas, Murphy’s story will be seen by fans of “Masters of the Air,” but most importantly, it will hopefully read by them as well.

As to why it’s an important story to tell?

It “really just comes down to love,” says Melas. “I just love my grandfather. And it’s a great story. And if anybody out there had a grandparent or a family member who they felt like had a great story, and they just loved them so much, they’d be shouting it from the rooftops too. So, I’m not saying that grandpa had some experience that many of my friends’ grandparents didn’t have, they just might not have it written down on paper. But we do have it. And there aren’t that many accounts like my grandfather’s.”

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The column of buses groaned to a halt near the bomb-cragged hangar at Hanoi’s Gia Lam Airport just after noon on Feb. 12, 1973. The men inside were the first 116 American POWs slated for repatriation. Some 700 miles south, another 27 captives of the Viet Cong were scheduled for release at Loc Ninh, South Vietnam. At the head of the line, the first 20 U.S. servicemen sat in expectant silence. For the most part, these were the “Old Timers”—those held longest in North Vietnam’s notorious Hoa Lo prison, sardonically dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by inmates.

As a matter of code and honor, the men of the “4th Allied POW Wing,” as they had named themselves, agreed that they would accept release only in the order of capture. In the front seat sat the Hilton’s first “guest,” Lt. j.g. Everett Alvarez Jr., 36, a Navy A-4 Skyhawk pilot who became the first American shot down over North Vietnam on Aug. 5, 1964. Beside him was Lt. Cmdr. Robert “Bob” Shumaker, the second-longest held among those assembled.

Suddenly a great cheer went up among the men. Someone had spotted the silver and white visage of a C-141 Starlifter, tail emblazed with a medical red cross, coming in for a landing. After eight and a half years of dashed hopes, Alvarez allowed himself to truly believe that the time of his liberation was at hand.

A Years-Long Effort For Freedom

Alvarez had been held captive by the Vietnamese longer than anyone except Army Special Forces Capt. Floyd “Jim” Thompson, captured by the Viet Cong after the O-1 Bird Dog spotter plane he was a passenger in (the pilot was killed) was shot down near Quang Tri, South Vietnam, some four months prior to Alvarez. Cruelly, Thompson’s “Freedom Day” would have to wait. Although he had finally been brought to Hoa Lo the day after the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam—better known as the Paris Peace Accords—was signed on Jan. 27, 1973, his release would not come until more than a month after this initial group. Kept separate from the Hilton long-timers, Thompson and others later speculated that the North Vietnamese had held him longer hoping that an improved diet would mask years of starvation and torture.

Indeed, hundreds of other American prisoners of war like Alvarez, Shumaker, and Thompson had suffered unimaginable degradation at the hands of their captors. As the big C-141—soon to be affectionately dubbed the “Hanoi Taxi”—rolled to a stop some 50 yards away, the trials and tribulations that this group of men had known as captives would soon end.

This moment was perhaps the most significant step in a years-long effort involving thousands of personnel from the federal government, Department of Defense, and all four military branches and the U.S. Coast Guard. As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War deepened in 1966, officials realized the need to prepare for the eventual repatriation of the accompanying surge of American POWs.

What followed was one of the most comprehensive and detailed operations of the war. Planners worked through nearly every detail of repatriation, from transportation, logistics, and personnel to every conceivable need and want of returning POWs. The goal was straightforward: no effort would be spared in ensuring the returnees’ physical, mental, and material well-being.

How Operation Homecoming Was Planned

Years earlier, the Joint Chiefs labeled the burgeoning plan “Operation Egress Recap.” But outgoing Defense Secretary Melvin Laird—who had waged a personal crusade on the POWs’ behalf since entering office in 1969—insisted the operation have a name more befitting its core ethos. To Laird, the “long-awaited repatriation of Americans captured in Southeast Asia deserved a more meaningful, more humanely engaging title.” On Jan. 8, 1973, he ordered that the operation henceforth be known as “Homecoming.”

According to the peace agreement, American POWs were to be released in increments directly linked to proportional withdrawals of remaining U.S. forces in Vietnam. Homecoming provided that each increment be repatriated in three phases. Phase I would see the return of POWs to U.S. control via flights from either Hanoi’s Gia Lam Airport, or from agreed-upon handover locations throughout Southeast Asia.

The destination was to be Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Clark had been chosen as the Joint Homecoming Reception Center for all returning POWs because of its proximity to Vietnam and its sprawling hospital facilities. The stay at Clark was to be intentionally brief, ideally no longer than 72 hours. The goal was to get the men home as quickly as safety allowed.

At Clark they would be met by male military service escorts specifically chosen for their similarity in rank, age, and interests to their matching returnee. Each escort was to build rapport with his man while shepherding him through all preliminary medical exams, intelligence debriefings, uniform fittings, career and financial counseling, calls home to family, and so on. The escort was to be the returnee’s “shadow,” even accompanying him to the dining facilities, base exchange, and to visit children at nearby schools—an excursion that became especially popular among those repatriated.

Once returnees were deemed fit for trans-Pacific travel, they would embark on Phase II flights to Travis Air Force Base in California. From there, Phase III flights would deliver the men to nearly a dozen bases throughout the U.S., usually nearest their homes and families. They would then undergo more comprehensive medical and psychological testing and treatment, as well as thorough intelligence debriefs to help determine the status of remaining POWs or those listed as missing in action.

Finally Being Released

All that lay ahead as Alvarez and the others climbed off the buses and formed smart columns, two abreast. Nearby, Air Force Col. James R. Dennett, head of the 18-man Reception Support Team and top U.S. negotiator on the ground, worked with his North Vietnamese counterpart, Lt. Col. Nguyen Phuong, to finalize the turnover. Dennett and his team had flown in hours earlier on a C-130 Hercules from PACAF’s 374th Tactical Airlift Wing to facilitate the transfer.

Accompanying Dennett’s team were 16 other crucial personnel, including a flight surgeon, several medical technicians, translators, photographers and public affairs specialists, and an airlift control crew. Also aboard was an AN/MRC 108 mobile radio system and crew which, in conjunction with an HC-130 Hercules radio-relay platform orbiting just off the North Vietnamese coast, allowed for real-time communication between Gia Lam, Clark, CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, and even the National Military Command Center in Washington, D.C. The Hercules also provided air rescue coverage for the Phase I flights.

Because information on the health and overall condition of POWs was virtually nonexistent, USAF Capt. Kenneth E. Green, Aeromedical Evacuation Management Branch commander at Clark, came for a firsthand look to better plan for the medical equipment and specialists needed to bring the returnees home safely.

Two civilians accompanied the recovery team: Dr. Roger Shields, 33, chair of the Defense Department’s POW/MIA Task Force, and 38-year-old Frank A. Sieverts, a State Department official specializing in POW affairs. Both men were instrumental in shaping and implementing U.S. repatriation policy for Operation Homecoming and beyond.

Attempts to Hide Abuse of POWs

Back at Gia Lam, Alvarez and Shumaker led the way as the first column marched in good order toward the airport terminal. Gone were the ragged and filthy POW pajamas the men had worn for years. The returnees were now clothed in the identical, light-colored zippered jackets and dark trousers that the North Vietnamese had provided only a few days before.

Many speculated that this, along with the improved diet and treatment afforded the POWs in recent months, was their captors’ attempt to mask years of cruelty and abuse. American and North Vietnamese officials gathered in front of the terminal around a white-covered table shaded by an old parachute canopy.

Each returnee stepped forward as a North Vietnamese official called his name. Alvarez incredulously noted that the roll-caller was none other than “the Rabbit” himself— a particularly ruthless interrogator and torturer given the derisive nickname by POWs due to his prominent ears and overbite.

At first unaware of the Rabbit’s notorious history, Dennett later discovered the truth and moved to bar him from further repatriation ceremonies. “[But] I was informed by our men that it would make no difference whatever,” he recalled. Since the men were thoroughly disciplined, they would not do anything to disrupt the proceedings.

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Alvarez stepped forward and saluted the receiving officer, USAF Col. Al Lynn. Then, an Air Force sergeant from the C-130 took the Navy flyer gently by the arm. “C’mon, sir,” he said, softly. “We’re gonna take you home.” Alvarez fought back a sob but maintained his composure as the sergeant led him past the gathered throng of international journalists.

While not part of the original Homecoming plan, the practice of C-130 crewmembers personally escorting each returnee to his C-141 would become standard for all subsequent flights into Hanoi. The reporters called after Alvarez for comment, but he and the others had been ordered by their senior ranking officer to speak to no one other than U.S. representatives, lest an errant comment somehow endanger those still awaiting release.

Reunited with fellow americans

The rest of the men then moved forward in turn, each dealing with overwhelming emotions in his own way. Held captive under terrible conditions for years, many limped from broken bones that had never properly healed. Yet the men nevertheless displayed a poise and military bearing that awed those who had come to take them home. Finally, three litter patients, too sick and hobbled to walk, were brought up by North Vietnamese bearers, with Americans taking over at midpoint to carry their brothers the final yards to the awaiting C-141.

Interestingly, there had been some controversy during planning over which aircraft would serve as the primary asset for Homecoming flights. The Aeromedical Command argued that its C-9 Nightingales, well-appointed and purpose-built for medical transport, were ideal for the mission. But the Military Airlift Command’s C-141 eventually won out for several reasons.

The big cargo jet’s remarkable 3,000-mile flight range—about 1,000 more than the Nightingale’s—made the C-141 well-suited both for both Phase I and II flights. Another factor was the C-141’s cavernous cargo bay. This allowed crews to configure the aircraft as needed, optimizing for any passenger, crew, or equipment need. The C-141s were outfitted with seats and litters to accommodate each returnee’s preference. While the planes could carry many times the number, Homecoming officials limited each flight to no more than 40 returnees to maximize space and comfort.

Standard operating procedure provided for both primary and backup aircraft on each Phase I increment. For example, three C-141s had flown in to pick up this first group of 116 returnees, with a fourth orbiting just below the DMZ in case of trouble. Throughout Homecoming’s duration—Feb. 12 through April 4—C-141s would ferry some 567 returnees in 17 Phase I flights out of North Vietnam, while making 38 Phase II flights from Clark to Travis, bringing home 591 former POWs.

Meanwhile, the 9th Aeromedical Evacuation Group’s C-9 fleet was tapped to handle all Phase I flights from areas outside North Vietnam. The C-9 would conduct four flights, picking up 27 former captives from Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, and another three released by China to officials in Hong Kong. Both C-141s and C-9s shared Phase III duty.

Back on the ground, Alvarez ascended the plane’s ramp and spied something he had not seen in nearly nine years—an American woman. He stood awestruck gazing at the “delicate apparition” before him of a beautiful blonde flight nurse in her early 30s wearing a form-fitting uniform. “Every slight movement she made was divine,” he later wrote.

While not aboard Alvarez’s plane, flight nurse Lt. Mikeline “Mickey” Mantel, then 25, says reactions like Alvarez’s were common—and welcome—during her service aboard four Phase I and II flights. “They just loved talking to us,” she says. “It wasn’t like they were trying to pick us up or flirt. It just felt good for them to talk to another American—and a female. And we were so glad to be there for them.”

Magazines and Treats

Nurses and medical techs escorted each returnee to his seat. The crew had brought aboard copies of Stars and Stripes and even a few Playboy magazines, along with electric razors, aftershave, and cloth hand towels. But on the food front, the men were to be disappointed. Homecoming dieticians were deeply concerned over the returnees’ digestive state after years of starvation diets and intestinal parasites. So they prescribed “Sustacal,” a rather bland high-protein drink, as the menu staple.

“The first thing the men wanted when they got on board was something to eat,” recalled Capt. Green. “It was rather embarrassing to say all we have for you is Sustacal.” The onboard flight surgeon eventually relented, allowing nurses to give the men apples, chocolates, even ice-cold Cokes to tide them over. Still, the dieticians never changed the menu for subsequent flights, so medical crews resorted to smuggling aboard chocolate cake, salami, cheese, crackers, and so on.

Bland diet or no, the men were ecstatic as the engines revved for takeoff. Alvarez, with his liberation so close at last, prayed silently that there would be no breakdown. The C-141 rumbled over the rough runway as the pilot, Maj. James E. Marrott, poured on the power.

All at once, the Starlifter’s wheels pulled free of the earth, and a tremendous roar went up among the returnees. The men cheered and laughed, backslapped and wept. After years of cruelty, mental and spiritual anguish, they were finally going home.

But what world would await them? Their captors had for years fed them a steady diet of antiwar protests and propaganda—including news of Jane Fonda “manning” an antiaircraft gun in Hanoi. Their answer would not be long in coming.

A Warm Welcome Home

About four hours later, another raucous roar of hoots and howls exploded as the Hanoi Taxi’s wheels touched down at Clark. Alvarez later wrote that during the flight it was agreed that he, as the longest-held, would deplane first and say a few words. At some point, however, Alvarez contends that Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jeremiah Denton, the senior ranking officer aboard, informed the junior officer that he, not Alvarez, would deplane first and speak.

When the moment came, Denton descended the ramp outside the C-141’s jump door and walked down the red carpet. Ironically, given Homecoming’s otherwise detailed planning, this item was procured at the last minute from the Inter Continental Hotel in Manila. Denton was greeted by the thunderous cheers of thousands who had come to welcome the men home.

The senior ranking officer on the second flight that day, USAF Lt. Col. James Robinson “Robbie” Risner, a legend among the POWs for his years of bravery and leadership, said he and his men were overwhelmed. “The sincerity and feelings in the welcome were beyond anything we had imagined,” he later wrote. “Some were crying, many waving flags; they were just like our family.”

Denton saluted and shook hands with CINCPAC Chief Admiral Noel Gayler and 13th Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. William G. Moore. As TV cameras rolled, he stepped to the microphone. “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances,” he said. “We are profoundly grateful to our commander-in-chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America!”

At every stop of the returnees’ long journey home, whether midday or midnight, freezing or raining, massive crowds gave an outpouring of love, welcome, and gratitude for those who had sacrificed so much. The men had gotten their answer in spades.

As for Alvarez, he would indeed get his chance to speak. As he deplaned at Travis and walked his own stretch of carpet—red, white, and blue—he was welcomed by Maj. Gen. John F. Gonge, commander of the 22nd Air Force, along with thousands who had come to cheer his homecoming.

After nearly nine years in brutal captivity, Alvarez addressed the crowd and millions around the world. He spoke of faith, hope, and dreams through the long dark years. “We have come home,” he said. “God bless the president and God bless you, Mr. and Mrs. America. You did not forget us.”

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On Aug. 5, 1964, a 26-year-old Hispanic combat pilot of the U.S. Navy dropped among a small fleet of Vietnamese fishing boats. He had just ejected from his Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and had literally fallen into an uncertain future. “I’d lost a wing, there was a lot of smoke, the plane was on fire, and every emergency indicator went off all at once,” Everett Alvarez Jr. later recalled. “I knew if I stuck with it I was definitely not going to make it.”

He was promptly dragged off to prison, and would spent a total of 3,113 days in grueling captivity as the second-longest-held POW of North Vietnam before finally being brought home on Feb. 12, 1973 in Operation Homecoming.

Nearly 50 years later in December 2022, U.S Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D.-Calif.) has introduced legislation seeking to honor Alvarez with the Congressional Gold Medal.

“In the face of severe mistreatment during his captivity in the Vietnam War, including torture and starvation, Commander Everett Alvarez, Jr. not only served and sacrificed, he also set an example for fellow POWs and inspired them to return home with honor,” Panetta said in a statement.

Alvarez spent year after year with almost no hope of release. He suffered from the effects of starvation and malnutrition in addition to abuse and attempts at political coercion from his captors. “Any time they found something we’d made to entertain ourselves, they would punish us,” he later said.

Yet despite the darkness all around him, Alvarez found it within himself to set an example for other POWs and encourage them not to give in to the coercion of the enemy. He refused to give up hope.

Alvarez returned home physically weakened after nearly a decade of being held captive, and his marriage did not outlast his imprisonment. However, he built a new life for himself, remarried and started a family, and has continued to be an inspiration to others.  

“I recognized the resiliency of the human spirit and that physically we’d been in a situation that very few people encounter,” he later said. “Thank God that I had my faculties. I’ve got my problems physically, but that’s minor compared to others who lost a lot. So I consider myself very fortunate.”

In response to his nomination for the Congressional Gold Medal, Alvarez says he is “humbled beyond belief.” “There is no way I am able to express my profound appreciation for this recognition,” he said, adding that he accepts the honor on behalf of others in his life.  

The legislation will now require 290 signatures from members of Congress to make the award a reality for Alvarez. “I think people need to learn more about his attitude while he was a prisoner of war and that he encouraged not just himself but his fellow POWS, to return home with honor,” Panetta told KSBW news, adding that “based on who Alvarez is, what he’s done and what he’s sacrificed, what he’s been through, it should be a little bit easier to get 290 for a Congressional Medal to recognize him than it would be for other bills.”

From the silver to the small screen, Colditz Castle during the Second World War has captured audiences in the West for over 75 years. Stories of ingenuity (the Colditz Cock, anyone?), bravery and swashbuckling officers with perfectly maintained mustaches playing a cat and mouse game with Nazis all while being held in captivity is worth its weight in Hollywood gold.

Such stories have been firmly mined by historians and screenwriters alike. Or have they?

Author Ben Macintyre recently spoke with HistoryNet about the notorious prison camp, and how, after all these years and countless retellings, there’s still so much to unearth.

You have often written these incredibly unique stories about these larger-than-life characters — who have been, more often than not, lost to history. What in particular drew you to the POWs at Colditz? 

Colditz is the most symbolic, famous, notorious wartime prison camp in history — it’s buried in our national mythology. It’s absolutely central to it. I grew up watching the black-and-white TV series about Colditz. I grew up playing the board game of Colditz.  

And so along with that kind of heavy symbolism comes a lot of mythology. There is a very clear legend associated with Colditz. To sort of to simplify it, it’s the legend of brave Brits with mustaches, winning the war in a different way by defying the German captors and digging their way out to freedom. Now, of course, there was a lot of that — there was a tremendous amount of bravery and resilience and a lot of incredible escape attempts. But what I found fascinating about Colditz is that it’s a kind of, it’s a strange, artificial, enclosed world that takes place in the middle of war. 

These are all prisoners who were captured, most of them right at the beginning of the war. And what you get is this sort of a strange, febrile, very odd atmosphere, where different people behave in different ways. You find that some of them are incredibly tough and resolute, and others behave in different ways. What always fascinates me is how ordinary different people respond to circumstances, particularly in wars that are not of their making.  

I just wanted to revisit that story really, because, like lots of wartime stories, what has come down to us is often rather simplified. The history of the Second World War is often, I think, presented as almost a moral fable. There’s a good side and a bad side, there are winners and losers, and the people who win it are on the right side of righteousness. And of course, that’s true to a great extent, but within that there’s also a much more interesting and moving and poignant set of stories to be told. 

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison

by Ben Macintyre, Crown Publishing, September 13, 2022

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What were the dynamics inside Colditz like among the prisoners? Was there really a difference among British and American POWs? 

Part of the myth is that Colditz was a very homogenous place where everyone worked together to achieve the single aim of defying the Nazis and getting out. The truth is it was riven with division.  

There were divisions by nationality, obviously between the Germans and the Allies, but within the Allies, you have the Poles, you have the French, Dutch, Belgians, you have Americans, you have the British, and they all had slightly different ways of coping with this world that they were in. And one of the ways was an intense rivalry between the nations.  

There were divisions of class. The Brits in particular are obsessed — still are — with the whole idea of class. Class was sort of imported into Colditz wholesale. These were officers, most of them. But they had orderlies to look after them. And those servants were also prisoners, but they were privates. There were ordinary soldiers who were not allowed to escape, so you had a kind of an extraordinary social cleavage, if you like, running straight down the middle of Colditz.  

Rather shockingly, I discovered that the French prisoners, the French officers, had demanded that the Jews in the camp be removed to a different part. They did not want to share barracks with French Jewish prisoners. At the time, of course, the Germans saw this as a huge propaganda opportunity and leapt at it. 

Another one of the stories that I found actually amazing was about a British officer who was Indian. He was a medic, a trained surgeon, and he suffered the most terrible racism in Colditz, but not from the Germans. It was the other white prisoners who treated him as a second-class citizen. He was told that he wasn’t allowed to escape because his skin color would mean that he was going to get caught, which might have been true, but it was still a profoundly racist thing to say. Yet he escaped. And his escape is absolutely astonishing. He walked 700 miles across Nazi-occupied Europe into Switzerland. His story has never been told because, in truth, he was the “wrong” color.  

I think there are many elements of the Colditz story that have been suppressed, really. We have a different approach to the world these days from the way it was written up immediately after the war. I hope that yields a different, and perhaps more sympathetic, way of looking at what happens when you lock up 500 people for five years. 

Can you speak more about some of the lesser-known figures that are no less remarkable? 

Somehow, both the society at the time and the history that was written afterwards did not consider them worthy of inclusion in the main story. There are women in the Colditz story. It was a prison camp for male officers and yet there are two women who played an absolutely crucial role in the history of Colditz. One was a middle-aged Scotswoman named Jane Walker who ran the escape networks out of Poland. Her cover was being a Polish housewife, but she was actually an MI6 officer. The prisoners who did manage to get out of Colditz went straight for her. She was vital. 

The other one was a very young dental assistant, believe it or not, in the village in Colditz, who contrived, amazingly, to have a love affair with one of the characters inside the prison. It turned out that she herself was a committed anti-Nazi resistance operative inside of the town, and she ended up passing intelligence information to the prisoners inside, which was then sent back in coded letters. She has never appeared in this story. She does now. 

Germany’s “escape-proof” POW camp, Colditz was, in fact, pretty escapable. There were some ingenious attempts made by British and American officers. Are there any that stand out to you? The Colditz Cock glider, for example? 

Oh, it was real. It was built. I mean, this was an actual glider that was built in the attic of Colditz. It involved 600 different pieces of wood, fabric made out of bed mattresses and a steering mechanism. The idea was that they would, as an emergency measure, catapult off the roof. There was to be a runway built on the apex of the longest roof and then they would use a weight filled with concrete, which they could use as a counterweight to drop it off the end to literally fling this thing into the air over the Mulde River. Now, it never flew but it undoubtedly existed.  

I think it was a way of keeping themselves from going a bit mad towards the end, but there were these other incredible escapes. That was partly because the Germans in their wisdom had decided to put all the most difficult prisoners, all the prisoners from other prison camps that had already tried to escape, they decided to put them in one place in the belief that if you put all the bad boys in one in one classroom, somehow, you’ll be able to keep control. As we all know, if you put all the naughty boys in one room, they’re egging each other on and very soon your classroom is on fire. So it actually turned out to be very counterproductive.  

And while this vast Gothic castle on a hill is extraordinary and looks impregnable, it’s actually full of holes. Colditz was riddled with underground passages and secret compartments. One of the more intelligent German officers did say, “You know, it’s probably the worst place we could have chosen to try and keep 500 extremely difficult, escape-prone prisoners.” And so right from the word “go” there was a battle on between the escapees and the guards to see to see who would come out on top. 

While it wasn’t implicit, both British and American officers felt that it was their duty to escape. However, were there any instances of men deciding to simply wait out the war as a POW? 

More than you would think. While there were plenty of escapers at Colditz, there were plenty of people who understandably decided that, particularly as the war moved towards its bloody climax, that it wasn’t worth it. Trying to get out of this prison was a very quick way to end up with a bullet in your head in an unmarked grave.  

If you were an officer and you escaped from Colditz, probably the worst that would happen to you would be to be brought back and put in solitary confinement for a few weeks. But as the war moved on and it became bloodier and more brutal, the SS began to take control over the prison camp system. Many, many people inside decided that the danger of escape was simply too much.  

That said, there was always a hardened core who never gave up who believed that it was their absolute duty to keep going. They were really in a pretty small minority by the end of it.  

The main enemy in Colditz was boredom. We imagine stories of war full of life and movement and color. That’s not true of a prison camp. So, in a way the battle they were fighting was often a mental battle to stay alert, to stay sane. Some lost that battle. It’s a part of Colditz life that is seldom discussed, but there was a high incidence of mental illness and breakdown, self-harm and suicide. It wasn’t a jolly game for everybody. For many people it was a terrible traumatic experience that they never recovered from. 

Is there something about the POW experience that lends itself to these types of narratives? 

I think there is. In places like Colditz it does ask a rather essential question in an odd way. It asks, or at least I hope this book asks, the question of “What would you do?” How would you, as a reader, have responded to it? Which one of these characters would you have been? It’s obviously a question none of us can truly answer, but it’s an imaginative thing that I think popular history — if it works — does very, very well is to try to place you in the position of those few. And I think that’s why these narratives have such a grip on us.  

We’d like to imagine that all of us would have that indomitable spirit to keep going, but would we have? And some of the people that I love most in this story are the least well known. They’re the modest ones who sort of did keep going but never pretended it was fun, never pretended that this was a jolly game. They just sort of stuck at it with a certain grim British humor. The Americans were the same. There were some extraordinary American prisoners in Colditz towards the end who really provided such a moral boost that they became almost mascots of the place. 

So, I think that some of these “lesser characters” are not lesser characters, really. They’re just characters that have been hidden perhaps behind a brightness of the celebrities also came out of Colditz. 

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As Robert “Bobby” Phillips and his friends played together after school in Quincy, Massachusetts, nobody in their close-knit hometown could have imagined that one day he would disappear without a trace in Vietnam after being ambushed by the enemy.  

Yet 52 years after Phillips’ disappearance, his friends and community still remember him fondly. Their affection for Bobby culminated in efforts to have his name inscribed on the city’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Clock Tower, despite legal hurdles and the elapse of decades. Their mission was finally realized on June 28, 2022, when the city held a memorial service at the clock tower with Bobby’s name freshly inscribed on it.  

A Much-Needed Photo

The memorial service was the result of a long journey in which Vietnam magazine played a role. A Vietnam magazine interview with researcher Janna Hoehn enabled Bobby’s friends to obtain a poster-sized photo of him to display at the service.

“I was trying to get a picture of Bobby Phillips for the ceremony we were going to have, so I sent her [Hoehn] an email …. She was really very helpful,” said James Vaughn, one of Bobby’s classmates who also served in Vietnam. “I would never have known about her efforts to get a picture for everybody.”

“People were going up after the ceremony taking their pictures with Bob [next to the poster],” said Vaughn. “That made me feel good — that he was so well-remembered in town.”

Phillips’ name is now publicly inscribed in the heart of Quincy because his friends did not give up on him.

Last Reunion in Vietnam

Founded in 1792, Quincy is known as the birthplace of American patriots John Hancock, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Vaughn describes it as a place where “everybody knows each other, and everybody’s got a silly nickname.”

Phillips, born in Quincy on July 31, 1949, was known as “Flipper” for his cheerful and boisterous personality.

“He was a bubbly kid. He was always talking in class,” Vaughn said.

John Magnarelli, another friend and former schoolmate, described him as “fun to be with, full of mischief and always getting into trouble.” Phillips eventually relocated out of state with his mother, and his classmates lost touch with him. Then, as fate would have it, he experienced an all-too-brief reunion with Magnarelli — in Vietnam.

“Too many of us went to Vietnam,” said Vaughn, adding that 50 men from Quincy lost their lives in Vietnam. “We died at twice the rate of the United States per capita.”

While Vaughn, drafted into the U.S. Army, found himself at a Marine base at Marble Mountain south of Da Nang, Magnarelli crossed paths with their old friend Bobby again. Magnarelli had just finished his tour of duty in April 1970 and was sitting on the tarmac at Bien Hoa Airbase when a familiar stranger walked back into his life.

“I waited patiently to hop on a Freedom Bird for the trip back to the world when all of a sudden I saw this soldier walking past me, and I instantly recognized Bobby Phillips,” he said.

It turned out that Phillips had not forgotten his time in Quincy. Finishing his second tour of duty, he was due to return to the States in August — and in fact told Magnarelli he was planning to move back to his old hometown. Both old friends were happy to see each other, but standing on the air strip at Bien Hoa, they didn’t have as much time to socialize as they would have wanted.

“We caught up as best we could in the short time we had and vowed to reconnect once he returned to Quincy,” Magnarelli said.

It was the last time any of Phillips’ Quincy friends saw him.

The Disappearance

On June 23, 1970, Pvt. Phillips, serving as a truck driver, left Dian for Lai Khe on what should have been a routine supply run. Accompanied by supply sergeant Joe Pedersen and armorer James Rozo, Phillips’ mission was to “update clothing records, retrieve excess equipment, adjust hand receipts” and inventory weapons for two subunits of the 595^th Signal Company.

Armed with M-16 rifles and one .45 caliber pistol, the three safely arrived in their 2 ½-ton GMC truck at Lai Khe. But the trip was not over — they still needed to make one last stop before returning.

Danger stalked the road to leading to their final stopover at Phuoc Vinh Signal Site. The usual route was closed off. Mines and booby traps had been discovered on the road, and soldiers were informed that unseen enemies could be lying in wait.

No less than three soldiers at Lai Khe warned SFC Pedersen on two separate occasions of the danger on the route and told him the correct detour to take. Despite this advice, SFC Pederson took his party down the old road. None of the men were ever seen alive again.

The truck that Phillips was driving was found empty in a ditch by the roadside with its engine still running. The windshields had been shattered by bullets. One of the front tires was blown out. A search party found the body of a Viet Cong insurgent who had apparently been killed by a shot from Pederson’s pistol. Three M-16 rifles, all jammed, were also discovered in the area.

Unaccounted For

From that point onward, Phillips’ fate remains undetermined. According to a captured Viet Cong named Tranh Van Thanh, who admitted participating in the ambush to U.S. counterintelligence agents in September 1970, Phillips and Rozo were taken away somewhere in the direction of Cambodia. The Viet Cong alleged that Pedersen had died of natural causes after “refusing to eat.” The captured soldier was unable to lead U.S. soldiers to a burial spot, and his claims were contradicted by a list of names released by the Viet Cong in 1973 of U.S. POWs who had died in captivity.

Another Viet Cong operative, taken prisoner in 1971, testified that he had seen two POWs matching the descriptions of Rozo and Phillips en route to Cambodia.

A U.S. intelligence report released to Rozo’s family in 1985 stated that the two men had attempted an escape in 1972 and that Phillips survived in the jungles for a short period before being recaptured and killed by the vengeful Viet Cong.

“I can’t imagine how frightening it was for him, constantly moving, foraging for food, evading his captors, with nothing but the clothes on his back,” Magnarelli said.

However, none of this information has been conclusively proven — and thus all three men are still listed by the U.S. government as “unaccounted for.”

“His [Phillips’] body was never recovered, and to this day there is still no closure for his family and friends,” Magnarelli said.

Phillips’ memory remains alive in the hearts and minds of those who knew him. His name is now displayed prominently on Quincy’s clock tower memorial.  

“Well, Bobby, it’s been a long time. Fifty-two years and you’re 10,000 miles from Quincy,” Magnarelli said in an emotional address at the memorial service. “But welcome home, my friend.” 

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Q: My German grandmother gave me this document. Her two younger brothers served in the Wehrmacht. The older brother was killed fighting in Yugoslavia; the younger brother, Johann, was captured on the Russian Front.

The family didn’t know what had happened to him until they received this postcard, dated Aug. 14, 1947; he returned to Germany several years later.

I’ve always wondered: Was it a common practice for the USSR to allow prisoners to write home?

—Michael O’Donnell, Huntington Station, N.Y.

A: Your great-uncle Johann Schulze was one of nearly 2.4 million Germans the Soviet Union captured during the war. Research by historian Mark Edele, a specialist in Soviet history, has found that 356,687 of them died in captivity. Tens of thousands of others remain unaccounted for, the causes of death unknown. The harsh climate and postwar deprivations made life difficult for the prisoners — as did vengeance for the boundless destruction and devastation the Nazis had caused. At the war’s end, many in German uniform did all they could to surrender to the forces of the Western Allies, not wanting to be captured by the Soviets.

Yet Soviet prisoners of the Germans fared even worse, with an estimated 43 to 63 percent perishing while captive — many murdered alongside civilians in concentration and death camps. In the years following the war, the Soviet Union used German POWs as forced laborers; the last prisoner was released from captivity in 1955 following petitions by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. 

It’s difficult to know for certain how many German prisoners were able to complete a note like Johann’s. Research into the Soviets’ treatment of German POWs has been complicated by closed archives and an ongoing politicization of the issue; Edele states that “sources are a problem.” 

The United States held roughly as many German POWs as the Soviets — under much different circumstances. The National WWII Museum’s archive contains letters from Germans held in Louisiana as well as in the American Zone of Occupation in Germany. As it did with your uncle, the International Red Cross facilitated this contact with the outside world. The letters home bear messages strikingly similar to that of Johann, who wrote: “Dear parents, your Johann sends you a couple of short sentences from prison. Hoping that all is going well for you all? I hope to see you again soon. With greetings to you all, Johann.”

Comparatively, Johann was spared the worst. He was one of the lucky ones, returning to grow old with his family.

— Kim Guise, Senior Curator and Director for Curatorial Affairs

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Q: Did the Soviets treat the Japanese POWs they captured as badly as they did German POWs, some of whom are kept in camps and gulags until the 1950s?

— Knox Martin, Memphis, Tennessee

A: The Red Army captured nearly 3 million German POWs during World War II. About one-third died in captivity during the war or shortly after. Most of the survivors were released by the end of 1946. Approximately 85,000—labeled “war criminals” — were held until 1950, subject to forced labor. The harsh Soviet treatment of German prisoners, however, is eclipsed by Nazi Germany’s barbarous treatment of Soviet POWs. Approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners were systematically starved to death by the Germans from 1941-45. Second only to Jews, Soviet POWs were the Nazis’ largest group of victims. Compared to these horrors — and Japan’s cruel treatment of Allied prisoners — Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union did not fare so badly.

On Aug. 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The next day, the Red Army launched a massive invasion of Manchuria, quickly overwhelming the Japanese defenders. Sporadic fighting continued until Aug. 30. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed into Japanese-occupied northern Korea and made amphibious landings on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, making good Stalin’s aim to retake the territory Russia lost to Japan in 1905. That autumn approximately 600,000 Japanese Imperial Army troops were marched north into captivity, to toil in labor camps throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. Two hundred thousand worked on the Baikal-Amur Mainline project, a railway to run parallel to, but well north of, the Trans-Siberian. Some 60,000-70,000 Japanese detainees died of disease, exposure and hunger, most in the winter of 1945-46. Repatriation of Japanese POWs began in 1946, was mostly completed in 1947-48, and continued in dribs and drabs until 1956.

—Historian Stuart D. Goldman is the author of “Nomonham, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II.”

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JAMES BALDASSARRE’S LONG-AWAITED CHANCE for payback was at hand. The 51-year-old sergeant, whom a reporter called the “perfect prototype … of the hard-bitten, sardonic ‘old Army regular,’” had watched Japanese guards torture and murder his fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942, and he had endured more than three brutal years as a prisoner of war, swearing to stay alive to see his captors get what they deserved. 

Now, on Jan. 9, 1946, he was in the Philippine capital of Manila to testify at the war-crimes trial of Masaharu Homma, the Japanese general who commanded the soldiers who had brutalized thousands of helpless American and Filipino prisoners during the march four years earlier. There was no doubt where Baldassarre stood.

“They should hang the man. He is a no-good son of a bitch. I should pull the rope …. Send him to me. I’ll fix him up,” he told reporters outside the courtroom. 

Homma’s defense attorneys portrayed their client as an out-of-touch commander, kept in the dark about the atrocities his troops were committing. The prosecutors, however, believed Homma knew about his men’s barbarity and had chosen to ignore it. 

Dozens of survivors were lined up to testify against Homma, so prosecutors would have little trouble proving the horrors of the march — but more was needed. The case hinged on a cloudier issue: Could Baldassarre and other witnesses link Homma to the atrocities of the march by showing Homma likely knew what his men were doing and had turned a blind eye to it? The answer could determine whether Homma lived or died.

HOMMA and the Philippines

AT THE START OF THE WAR, Japan targeted the Philippine islands, an American possession since 1898. Tokyo assigned Lt. Gen. Homma and his 14th Army to capture the islands, and expected the campaign to take no more than 50 days. Homma’s opponent was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the American and Filipino troops in the Philippines.

Born in 1888, Homma was a career soldier and a man of eclectic interests. A tall, stern-looking man, he had graduated from Japan’s military academy in 1907 and from its army staff college in 1916, and had served as military attaché to London from 1930-32. He spoke fluent English, enjoyed Western literature, wrote poetry, and was an avid tennis player. 

On Dec. 10, 1941, the first Japanese infantry troops invaded the Philippines when a small force of Homma’s men landed on northern Luzon, the main island. They quickly showed how brutal they could be. His soldiers entered the office of Buenaventura Bello, 51, an administrator at Northern College in Vigan. They ordered him to remove the American and Philippine flags from his office, but he refused.

“These hands are made to defend them and never to pull them down,” he said.

A soldier shot him in the groin. (Bello survived.)

Macarthur’s defense

Homma’s main landings were at Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila, on Dec. 22, and, two days later, at Lamon Bay, to the south. MacArthur abandoned Manila on Dec. 26, declaring it an open city to spare civilians from attack, and withdrew his forces into the 25-mile-long Bataan Peninsula, across Manila Bay from the capital. Homma misread the retreat as the disorganized flight of defeated troops, but it was a planned withdrawal by soldiers ready to fight. MacArthur had anticipated making a stand on Bataan if his men couldn’t stop the Japanese on the invasion beaches; mountainous Bataan was well-suited for defense, and MacArthur intended to hold it. 

From January 1942 onward, MacArthur’s American and Filipino troops maintained their grip on Bataan, withstanding repeated Japanese attacks, and by early February, Homma realized he needed more men. Tokyo was already impatient with him for the campaign’s slow progress, and Homma was ashamed to need reinforcements. 

While MacArthur’s troops continued to stymie the enemy, their situation was growing dire. A Japanese blockade of the Philippines meant the men had to make do with what they had. Food was in short supply. Rations were cut to 2,000 calories per day in January, about half of what a soldier needed; by March, they were down to 1,000 calories per day — “just about enough to keep a man alive if he stays in bed,” Army doctors said. Medicines began to run low, and malaria and dysentery took their toll.

Homma’s Plan

Once Homma had his reinforcements in hand, he planned a final offensive for early April. Confident of victory, he had his staff devise a plan to transport the American and Filipino soldiers he expected to capture on Bataan to prison camp. Under the plan, prisoners would assemble at Balanga, about 19 miles north of the southern tip of Bataan. From Balanga, they would march about 35 miles north to San Fernando. From there, they would travel by rail to a prison camp in central Luzon. On paper, the plan prepared by Homma’s staff called for humane treatment of the prisoners, a staff officer insisted. 

The U.S. War Department, too, knew the end was near, and in March 1942 had ordered MacArthur to evacuate to Australia to avoid his capture by the Japanese. Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright replaced MacArthur, and Maj. Gen. Edward P. King Jr. was put in command on Bataan. 

On April 3, 1942, Homma launched his offensive, and his troops sliced through Allied lines. The American and Filipino defenders no longer had the strength to fight. Almost every man suffered from the effects of prolonged starvation as well as from malaria or dysentery, the chief medical officer, Col. Wibb Cooper, recounted. Most had lost 20 to 30 pounds, and commanders estimated that many weren’t fit enough to walk 100 yards without resting.

On April 9, 1942, Gen. King surrendered the approximately 75,000 troops on Bataan, the largest surrender in American history. He set aside U.S. Army trucks and cars to transport his men to prison camp, but the Japanese refused to use them. When King sought assurances that the Japanese would treat his men humanely, an officer replied, “We are not barbarians.”

Nevertheless, King had reason to worry because Homma’s men had already shown that they often played by their own rules. They had continued to bomb Manila after MacArthur had abandoned it. Prisoners of war had been executed, and Japanese planes had targeted an Army hospital marked with a red cross. 

POW Hell

THE PLIGHT OF THE BATAAN PRISONERS quickly degenerated into chaos. The Japanese had expected no more than 40,000 prisoners, but the number was nearly double that, and they hadn’t anticipated just how malnourished and sick the men were.

The main problem, however, was that Japanese soldiers viewed their captives with contempt. As Homma himself admitted, the Japanese army treated surrender as the ultimate disgrace, and its soldiers were taught to die rather than capitulate. Contempt led to harsh treatment. According to historian Charles A. Stenger, during the war, 40.4% of the American servicemen held by the Japanese died in captivity, while the death rate for those held by Germany was 1.2%. 

Homma had other matters on his mind, and “interest and consideration for Prisoners of War was ‘thin’ from Homma on down,” said Col. Toshimitsu Takatsu, one of Homma’s staff officers. Homma’s job wouldn’t be done until he seized Corregidor, the island fortress in the mouth of Manila Bay. As long as Allied forces held Corregidor, the Japanese couldn’t use Manila Bay, one of the finest harbors in Asia. Because of mounting pressure from Tokyo, Homma became preoccupied with Corregidor. Prisoners had to be removed from Bataan quickly so that he could bring troops and supplies to southern Bataan for an amphibious assault on the island. 

SAVAGE TREATMENT

Guards treated prisoners and civilians with savage fury. Sgt. Michael Bruaw heard a group of 25 prisoners scream as guards used them for bayonet practice. Maj. Richard Kadel saw a terrified Filipino family of eight flee when shells from Corregidor exploded nearby. A patrol caught them, and an officer held a baby by the legs as he sliced off the infant’s head with his sword. His men forced the other seven to kneel as they beheaded them one by one. 

American and Filipino prisoners marched in groups of 100 up Bataan’s two-lane Old National Road toward Balanga and San Fernando. Men struggled to keep up, but they had no choice because the alternative was death. Guards, whom the prisoners called “buzzard squads,” finished off those who couldn’t go on. 

Sgt. Baldassarre saw a colonel stagger off the road, muttering, “I can’t make the hike anymore.” Before he went 6 feet, a guard shot him. The same fate befell a lieutenant who stumbled off the route murmuring, “I am all in.” Sgt. Horace Clark watched a soldier he knew as “Big Smitty” drop from exhaustion. Big Smitty’s friends tried to pick him up, but guards chased them away as another guard beheaded the helpless soldier. Maj. Bertram Bank helped carry a weakened lieutenant colonel; a guard forced Bank to drop the man, and then drove a bayonet through the colonel. 

The side of the road along the route soon became littered with corpses that remained unburied for days. In the 18-mile stretch between Balanga and Lubao, for example, Sgt. Baldassarre saw hundreds of American and Filipino bodies. If a corpse stayed on the roadway, passing trucks flattened it.

Guards tormented the exhausted men by speeding up the march to double-time pace. As Japanese trucks passed by, soldiers in them reached out with clubs to hit prisoners. Maj. Fred Castro saw guards throw exhausted men into a pit. One begged for mercy as the guards forced prisoners to fill the pit with dirt, burying them alive. Near the Pantingan River, guards tied several hundred Filipino prisoners together and attacked them with swords and bayonets. Only a handful survived.

The heat drove prisoners mad with thirst. Artesian wells dotted the route, but guards beat or killed prisoners who tried to drink from them. Men became so parched that they drank from streams filled with rotting corpses. Even rest breaks had a sadistic twist. Guards forced prisoners to sit under the blistering sun without shade, food or water.
To Lt. William E. Dyess, a fighter pilot captured on Bataan, “we ceased to be men — more like filthy, starving rabble.”

No REspite

Filipino civilians took pity on the prisoners.

“They could hardly walk. Some of them, they were carried by their companions,” said Fernando Ocampo, an American-educated Filipino architect.

Ocampo and his sister brought baskets of bananas, rice cakes and hard-boiled eggs to give to the prisoners, but a guard kicked the food into a ditch. When the captives scrambled to retrieve it, guards hit them with rifle butts. Prisoners saw guards beat or kill other Filipino Good Samaritans. 

For most prisoners, the march to San Fernando took nearly a week. The Japanese provided food sparingly, if at all. Lt .Dyess, for example, was fed only one mess kit of rice the entire time. At San Fernando, the prisoners were crammed into steel boxcars for the four-hour train ride to Camp O’Donnell, a former Philippine army base and now a prison camp. Dyess counted 115 men in one car. Many suffered from dysentery, and the boxcar floors were covered with human waste. Guards kept the doors locked, and men struggled to breathe the hot, fetid air. They arrived at Camp O’Donnell “dehydrated, starved and in the merest rags of clothing,” Brig. Gen. James R. N. Weaver reported. No one will ever know the exact number of men who perished on the march and the trip to Camp O’Donnell; historians estimate the death toll at 10,000. 

At Camp O’Donnell, the suffering continued. The men were inadequately fed, and disease ran rampant. Relief agencies brought food and medicines to the camp, but the Japanese kept these items for themselves. By June 2, 1942, more than 25,000 American and Filipino prisoners had died at Camp O’Donnell.

Homma ended the campaign by capturing Corregidor on May 6, 1942. He had taken nearly five months to finish a task expected to take no more than 50 days, and he paid with his job. On Aug. 5, 1942, he was relieved and sent home to Japan, where he spent the rest of the war in retirement. 

HEAD TURNED, EYES CLOSED

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT and the American public didn’t learn of the Death March for more than a year. They got the news after Lieutenant Dyess escaped from Davao prison camp, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, in April 1943, made his way to Australia, and gave the first eyewitness account of the march. When his story hit newsstands on Jan. 28, 1944, it sparked a level of anger not seen since the Pearl Harbor attack. President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed that those responsible would pay. Congressmen vowed vengeance. The public spoke with its wallet, and war-bond sales nearly doubled. Homma had become a marked man. 

As Japan’s formal Sept. 2, 1945, surrender approached, MacArthur was sent to Japan as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, and part of his job was to oversee the trials of Japanese war criminals. On Sept. 11, he ordered the arrest of 40 suspects, Homma included. When Homma turned himself in four days later, he told reporters he was surprised to be on MacArthur’s list. As for the Death March, he said, “I don’t think it was such a tough march.” 

On Nov. 4, 1945, the United States charged Homma with a war crime for failing to “control the operations of the members of his command, permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes” against Filipino and American soldiers and Allied civilians. The charges specified 47 separate acts of barbarity that included not only the Death March but also the mistreatment of civilians interned in Manila, neglect of prisoners at Camp O’Donnell, and the widespread abuse of Filipino civilians. If convicted, Homma could be sentenced to death. 

On Dec. 15, five generals — four Americans and one Filipino — were selected as judges for Homma’s trial. One, Philippine Maj. Gen. Basilio J. Valdes, had an axe to grind against the Japanese. They had murdered his brother, Alejo, when they mistook him for Basilio.

An experienced litigator, 53-year-old Lt. Col. Frank E. Meek, was named the lead prosecutor, heading a team of one Filipino and five American officers. Maj. John H. Skeen Jr. was selected to head the defense team of six junior U.S. Army officers. Skeen, a 27-year-old attorney who had never tried a criminal case, had expected to rotate home and wasn’t thrilled to be defending Homma. In a letter to his wife, however, he promised to “give the S.O.B. everything possible in the way of defense.”

All the judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys served under MacArthur’s command.

In pretrial motions, Homma’s attorneys attacked the proceedings for numerous reasons, including the rules of evidence MacArthur’s headquarters had put in place. These rules, for example, allowed the prosecutor to present affidavits in lieu of live testimony — something impermissible in American courts because it violated the accused’s right to confront the witnesses against him. The issues Homma’s attorneys raised were already before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had been sentenced on Dec. 7, 1945, to hang for the brutal acts his men committed when Allied forces retook Manila earlier that year. 

Homma’s lawyers also challenged MacArthur’s pervasive role in the proceedings: Not only had he ordered the trial, with the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys all serving under him, but if a death sentence were imposed, MacArthur would decide if it would be carried out. Since Homma had beaten MacArthur on Bataan, they argued, MacArthur’s role in the proceedings created the appearance that the trial was about revenge for that defeat, not justice. The judges denied these motions and ordered the case to proceed. 

witness to truth

THE TRIAL BEGAN on Jan. 3, 1946, in Manila’s high commissioner’s residence, still pockmarked with damage from the fighting to recapture Manila. To Lt. Robert L. Pelz, one of the defense attorneys, the 57-year-old Homma looked like “a tired-out grandfather who has girded his loins for a last battle.” 

No one contended that Homma had ordered any atrocities or participated in any. He was charged because he commanded the men who had committed these crimes and had done nothing to stop them. While a commander’s duty to control his troops was well-established, the breadth of command responsibility was a murky issue. The uncertainty was whether a commander was automatically liable for his men’s misconduct or whether he was criminally responsible only if he knew, or should have known, what his troops were doing. In his opening statement, prosecutor Meek promised to prove that Homma had had actual knowledge of his men’s misdeeds. Their brutality was “so widespread and so broad in pattern and design and so continuous,” he argued, that Homma had to have known.

Next, Meek moved to back up his words with evidence. He showed that Homma’s headquarters at Balanga were 500 yards from the march route — so close, Meek asserted, that if he “cared to listen he could have heard the screams of the wounded and the dying.” But Meek wanted something more direct to prove Homma’s knowledge, and Sgt. Baldassarre and a Filipino captain provided it. 

Baldassarre recalled numerous Japanese officers in staff cars passing the prisoners during the march and described seeing one high-ranking officer on the march route near San Fernando. A Japanese soldier told him it was Homma. When asked at trial if the high-ranking officer he had seen was in the courtroom, Baldassarre pointed at Homma and said, “He is right there now, sir.”

Capt. Alberto Abeleda described a similar incident. On the route near Lubao, Abeleda saw a “big, flashy car” stop in front of a warehouse. Japanese soldiers snapped to attention as an officer got out of the car, spoke to one of them, and then left. Abeleda described the officer as a big man, and Homma stood just over 6 feet tall. Abeleda told the judges he later saw Homma’s photo in a Manila newspaper and recognized him as the officer he had seen. 

This testimony hurt Homma’s cause badly. Numerous witnesses had described how the march route was strewn with corpses, implying that no one who traveled that road could have missed seeing them. If Homma had seen those corpses, he knew his men were running amok and had a legal duty to stop the carnage.

between life and death

ON JAN. 21, the prosecution rested. It was now the defense’s turn, and Homma’s attorneys sought to establish that Homma had been ignorant of what his men were doing. Surprisingly, the defense also called several of Homma’s underlings to try to show that the march wasn’t all that bad — an impossible position in light of the harsh conditions that numerous survivors had already described. 

Maj. Moriya Wada swore that fewer than 30 prisoners perished on the march and that they had died from disease, not mistreatment. Col. Yoshio Nakajima insisted he saw prisoners near Balanga resting in the shade and eating Japanese rations while other prisoners swam in a nearby stream. Col. Seiichi Ohta maintained that guards gave the men ample food and water and allowed them to rest as needed. Homma’s chief of staff, Takeji Wachi, went further, insisting that guards helped tired prisoners to the side of the road to rest or onto trucks to ride to San Fernando. These witnesses all had a motive to lie to avoid being charged with war crimes themselves. 

HOmma Speaks

One month into the trial, on Feb. 4, Homma took the stand to insist he hadn’t learned of the march’s horrors until hearing the survivors’ testimony. He portrayed himself as a figurehead with limited authority over his subordinates. Preoccupied with Corregidor, he had relied on these subordinates, he claimed, and they hadn’t reported any mistreatment to him.

“I am ashamed of myself should these atrocities have happened,” he said.

He admitted traveling on the march route on several occasions but claimed, “[m]y memory on the point is somewhat obscure.”

He denied seeing any corpses.

“I was not looking for them particularly,” he explained. 

The same day Homma took the stand, the defense got bad news when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in the Yamashita case. Since that case raised the same issues as Homma’s, it was now unlikely the high court would hear his lawyers’ motions. 

As the trial neared its end, the defense tried to humanize its client by calling Homma’s 42-year-old wife, Fujiko, to testify that her husband wasn’t the kind of person to countenance atrocities.

“I am proud of the fact that I am the wife of Gen. Homma,” she said, as Homma wept at counsel table.

Mrs. Homma, described by a reporter as a tiny, kimono-clad woman who spoke “animatedly and earnestly,” was such a sympathetic figure, prosecutor Meek later remarked, that he was “never so glad in all my experiences in court to have a witness get off the stand.”

The Verdict

Feb. 11 was decision day. Homma stood as the chief judge, Maj. Gen. Leo Donovan, solemnly announced that they found him guilty and sentenced him to be “shot to death with musketry.”

That same day, the Supreme Court refused to hear Homma’s case, which removed the last legal obstacle to Homma being punished by military judges operating under the rules set by MacArthur’s headquarters. Two justices, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, disagreed and condemned the proceedings.

“Hasty, revengeful action is not the American way,” they stated, and compared the trials of Homma and other Japanese officers to “blood purges” and “judicial lynchings.”

Homma’s fate now rested with MacArthur. As supreme commander, he would decide if Homma would be executed or spared. Fujiko Homma traveled to Tokyo to plead her husband’s case, and MacArthur met with her on March 11. She was a “cultured woman of great personal charm,” he said, and he called the meeting “one of the most trying hours of my life.” He promised to give “the gravest consideration” to what she had said.

Notwithstanding Mrs. Homma’s pleas, MacArthur affirmed the conviction and death sentence 10 days later.

“If this defendant does not deserve his judicial fate, none in jurisdictional history ever did,” he stated. “There can be no greater, more heinous or more dangerous crime than the mass destruction, under guise of military authority … of helpless men.”

As for the proceedings themselves, “no trial could have been fairer than this one,” MacArthur said.

The sentence was carried out at 1 a.m. on April 3, 1946, at Los Baños, a former internment camp south of Manila. MPs led Homma, hands bound behind his back, into the yard and tied him to a post. He was “calm and stoical,” a reporter noted, and refused to make a final statement. A black hood was placed over his head, and an army doctor put a four-inch round target over his heart. On command, 12 soldiers standing 15 paces away fired.

“Army precision marked the grim, nearly silent drama,” the Associated Press reported. 

justice served?

SINCE 1946, HISTORIANS and legal commentators have had harsh words for Homma’s trial. The evidence was strong enough to allow the judges to find that Homma knew what his troops were doing, so the outcome might have been the same regardless of the circumstances. MacArthur’s pervasive role, however, created an unsettling appearance of unfairness and bias, leading to a preordained result. 

Homma had beaten MacArthur on Bataan, the only time the Japanese had defeated the U.S. Army in a major campaign and the only battlefield loss MacArthur had ever suffered. The judges answered to MacArthur, and MacArthur’s rules of evidence wouldn’t have passed muster in an American court. An experienced prosecutor was pitted against a courtroom novice, and just one person — MacArthur — had the power to spare Homma’s life. The deck appeared to be stacked. D. Clayton James, a respected biographer of MacArthur, called the trial a miscarriage of justice, and William Manchester, another prominent MacArthur biographer, went so far as to conclude that Homma was convicted by a kangaroo court “which flouted justice with the Supreme Commander’s approval and probably at his urging.” 

Sgt. Baldassarre, however, shed no tears. In fact, he didn’t understand why Homma deserved a trial at all. The Japanese “never trialed us. They killed people like flies” and gave the prisoners “nothing but bullets and bayonets,” he told reporters during the trial. To the crusty sergeant, a score had been settled. 

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Air Force Maj. Fred V. Cherry, the pilot of an F-105D Thunderchief shot down by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 22, 1965, was sitting in a dark 10-by-12-foot cell in North Vietnam. His left foot was wrapped in a cast and his left arm in a sling. Suddenly the cell door opened, and a guard ushered in another prisoner of war, Navy Lt. Porter Alexander Halyburton, a radar intercept officer on a two-seater F-4B Phantom II hit by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 17, 1965. Cherry was the first African American service member captured in North Vietnam, while Halyburton came from a middle-class Southern family that employed Black servants.

A prison guard ordered Halyburton: “You must take care of Cherry.”

Neither man knew what to make of the other. Cherry, 37, explained that he was an Air Force major who flew an F-105. Halyburton, 24, found that hard to believe as most Blacks he knew worked as laborers. He had never met an African American who outranked him. Cherry didn’t believe his new cellmate was American. He presumed that Halyburton was a Frenchman left over from France’s colonial rule, which ended in 1954, and most likely worked for the North Vietnamese as a spy.

The North Vietnamese Attempt to “Divide and Conquer”

During their first night together at Cu Loc Prison, Halyburton tried to make conversation by asking Cherry questions about his background, flight origin and the date he was shot down, which seemed to confirm Cherry’s suspicions that his cellmate was a spy.

Yet it didn’t take long for Cherry to recognize the North Vietnamese strategy in putting them in the same cell.

The guards knew both men were from the South, he recalled in an oral history collection of Black Vietnam War veterans, edited by Wallace Terry and published in 1984. “They figured under those pressures, we couldn’t possibly get along—a white man and a Black man from the American South.”

Prison authorities believed that if they couldn’t get Cherry and Halyburton to cooperate through torture, harassment or isolation, they would play upon the turbulent race relations in America by using Cherry as a propaganda tool to exploit racial tensions in the U.S.

He was repeatedly told by his interrogators that whites were racists and colonizers and that he had more in common with Asians. The guards evoked the words of Malcolm X, who openly criticized American involvement in Vietnam.

Despite their captors’ effort to exploit the racial divide, the two Americans gradually established trust in one another and developed a close bond as they shared stories about their home, families and the military service that had brought them to this point.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Cherry’s Journey to Vietnam

Cherry, the youngest of eight children, was born in Suffolk, Virginia, on March 24, 1928, of African American and Native American heritage. He grew up in a poor farming family that lived in a swampy area during the Great Depression, a time when racial segregation and discrimination were strictly enforced by state Jim Crow laws.

Although poor Blacks and whites lived side by side in Cherry’s farming community, Blacks weren’t regarded as equals. “You go over to the white farmhouse to get some homemade butter, and you had to ‘Miss’ and ‘Mister’ them,” Cherry said in his oral history interview. “Whites always called Blacks by their first name. It was sort of understood you had your place.”

In Cherry’s racially segregated public schools, white children rode half-full buses, while he and his siblings walked three miles to their school. In the impoverished agrarian South, where survival often trumped protest and confrontation, Cherry was taught that progress was possible through hard work and tenacity—if you were willing to endure the personal affronts.

As a young man, Cherry became fascinated with U.S. Navy aircraft practicing carrier landings at a nearby base and later found inspiration in the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, Black fighter pilots in World War II. Cherry went to Virginia Union University, a historically Black college in Richmond. Before graduating he took qualifying examinations for flight school at Langley Air Force Base in nearby Hampton. He was the only African American among the 20 applicants and achieved the highest score.

Cherry flew more than 50 combat missions during the Korean War and rose to the rank of major after serving in various posts at home and abroad. He was deployed to Southeast Asia in the early days of the Vietnam War.

On his 52nd combat sortie over North Vietnam, Cherry led a flight of four F-105D Thunderchief fighter-bombers of the 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron that took off from Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base on a mission to destroy a surface-to-air missile installation 15 miles northeast of Hanoi. After crossing the Laotian-Vietnamese border, Cherry descended to treetop level, flying low to avoid radar detection. Just three minutes from his target, he saw muzzle flashes from the rifles of enemy ground troops. Cherry then heard a loud thump. His aircraft shook and swerved. Locking the control stick between his legs, the pilot used both hands to try to steady his Thunderchief as the plane jerked.

Cherry saw the SAM installation ahead with several missile-launching batteries in a circular formation. Undeterred, he pressed the attack, releasing his payload of cluster bombs on the target and setting off series of explosions. In his rearview mirror, Cherry saw the SAM site being consumed by massive fireballs.

Straining to gain altitude in his damaged F-105, he immediately headed for the Gulf of Tonkin 40 miles east, where he intended to bail out and be picked up by the Navy. Suddenly, smoke began pouring out of the instrument panel. Multiple warning lights flashed. Any hope of reaching the sea was gone. The aircraft exploded and flew out of control.

Cherry ejected from his crippled Thunderchief at 400 feet and 600 mph. The violent expulsion from the high-speed aircraft left him with a broken left wrist, a broken left ankle and a shattered left shoulder. He parachuted onto a small grassy hill just two minutes from the coast. Almost immediately, the injured American pilot found himself surrounded by a dozen armed Vietnamese militiamen and civilians.

Cherry was disarmed, stripped of his gear and marched off with his elbows tied behind his back. The constraint caused excruciating pain to his broken shoulder. The captive was driven to what appeared to be a school and interrogated under torture for hours. Throughout his grueling captivity, Cherry firmly adhered to the U.S. Military Code of Conduct, giving only his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

That night, he was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, whose Vietnamese name translates roughly to “fiery furnace” and was infamously known to POWs as the Hanoi Hilton, a caustic reference to the torture that took place there. The more Cherry refused to cooperate, the more abusive his interrogators became. His arms were twisted behind his back and forced upward, pulling his already shattered left shoulder from its socket. Cherry endured daily interrogations and torture over the next few days. His left ankle became badly swollen and his shoulder contorted, but he was denied medical care as punishment for his refusal to cooperate.

One month after his capture, Cherry was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, sardonically dubbed by the POWs as “the Zoo,” where he would soon meet Halyburton.

Halyburton’s Journey to Vietnam

Halyburton, born Jan. 16, 1941, grew up in the small college town of Davidson, North Carolina, then an intellectual suburbanite’s enclave steeped in patriotism, Southern charm and insidious racism.

He was raised by his mother and grandparents in a town that largely opposed desegregation. His community and, by extension, his family believed that Blacks were intellectually inferior and could only do manual labor.

Halyburton’s grandfather, although regarded as being charitable and respectful toward his Black housekeeper and her family, did not treat them as equals. They were welcome to enter the home through the front door but were not allowed to share the family’s bathrooms.

Halyburton attended the Sewanee Military Academy in Tennessee and Davidson College. There he was inculcated with an appreciation for discipline and structure. Yet his interests also included literature, poetry and the power of prayer.

He considered going into journalism, but with the escalating Cold War and the possibility of being drafted, Halyburton decided to volunteer. Inspired by a fraternity brother’s experiences as a naval aviator flying the F-4 Phantom II, he enlisted in the Navy after graduating in 1963.

“Haly,” as his buddies called him, completed the preflight program on Oct. 10, 1963, and was later assigned to fighter squadron VF-84 aboard the carrier USS Independence. There he trained as a radar intercept officer, which made him responsible for navigation and identifying targets while riding in the backseat of a Phantom.

On Halyburton’s 75th mission of the war, aircraft from the Independence took part in a large airstrike to destroy a rail bridge at Thai Nguyen, 75 miles north of Hanoi, the farthest north Halyburton had ever flown. Anti-aircraft fire hit his F-4. Halyburton ejected before the plane crashed, but his pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Stanley Olmsted, was killed.

As his parachute drifted down, Halyburton could hear groundfire directed at him from a nearby village. After landing, he attempted to make his way up the nearest hill, hoping to be rescued by Navy helicopters, but he was soon captured by North Vietnamese militia and sent to the Hanoi Hilton.

Halyburton endured days of interrogations that lasted for hours at a time. Then he was given a choice: Cooperate and receive better treatment or refuse and be taken to a place where conditions were worse. Thinking there couldn’t possibly be anywhere worse than the Hanoi Hilton, he chose the latter. Halyburton was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, “the Zoo,” on Nov. 27, 1965.

Shared Sufferings

On Dec. 24, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson paused the bombing campaign and sent a 14-point peace plan to North Vietnam’s President Ho Chi Minh. In the event that peace was declared, the North Vietnamese were to provide injured American POWs with medical care.

Cherry finally had surgery on his shoulder and was placed in a torso cast. Yet without the benefit of antibiotics, the incisions became infected. On Jan. 31, 1966, negotiations on the 14-point peace plan broke down and the fighting resumed. Afterward, Cherry was left to rot in his cell with no medication or treatment.

Although Halyburton was able to shower periodically, Cherry wasn’t allowed to shower for four months due to his condition. Halyburton fed and bathed his cellmate, changed his dressings and cleaned his wounds. One day he noticed that ants had invaded Cherry’s scalp where mounds of gunk had developed. Standing with him in a quarter inch of slime in a makeshift cold-water shower, Halyburton undressed Cherry and soaped and scrubbed his hair again and again until the greasy gobs and dead ants floated in the slime around their feet.

When Cherry developed a fever and began hallucinating, Halyburton begged prison authorities to save Cherry’s life. Not wanting their only Black American POW and valuable propaganda asset to die, the North Vietnamese relented, and Cherry underwent a series of crude surgeries at a hospital to treat his infections.

As the two men struggled to survive, Halyburton realized that he too had benefited from their time together. The Navy lieutenant had neared a dangerous abyss of despair during his torturous days in isolation before meeting Cherry. Thus, while Halyburton had saved Cherry’s life, Cherry had given Halyburton a purpose and the will to persevere.

In an email to journalist James S. Hirsch, author of 2004 book about the two POWs, Halyburton wrote: “Caring for Fred…I realized how trivial [my concerns] were by comparison and how he bore his pain and suffering with such dignity…The task of caring for him gave a definite purpose to my immediate existence…I received much more from him than I was able to give.”

On July 6, 1966, 52 POWs, including Halyburton, were paraded through the streets of Hanoi in a propagandistic attempt to demonstrate the North Vietnamese people’s anger at the U.S. bombing campaign. Thousands of agitated civilians descended upon the American captives and attacked them with bricks, bottles, stones, garbage and fists. Halyburton returned to his cell battered and bruised.

Shortly after Halyburton’s brutal beating, Cherry was brought back from the hospital, where he had undergone a “sadistic” cutting of dead flesh without anesthesia. As his blood dripped all over the floor, Cherry collapsed into the arms of his friend. “Fred,” Halyburton exclaimed, “what in the world did they do to you?” Both men remembered that they shed “a tear or two” that night as they dwelled on their sufferings.

Four days later, on July 11, 1966, Halyburton was transferred to another prison, known as the Briarpatch, 33 miles northwest of Hanoi. “Tears started to roll down my eyes,” Cherry recalled. “We cried. And he was gone…I never hated to lose anybody so much in my entire life. We had become very good friends. He was responsible for my life.”

Discussing his friendship with Halyburton years later in an email to Hirsch, Cherry said: “He was white and he was from the South, but he taught me that you can grow up in that environment and separate the good from the bad and the right from the wrong. He was one who did that.”

After Halyburton’s departure, the North Vietnamese continued to press Cherry to make public statements regarding racial intolerance in the United States, but he refused. Cherry spent 702 days in solitary confinement and was tortured for 93 days in a row.

Lifelong Friendship

On Jan. 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed after years of negotiations. As part of the agreement, all American POWs were to be released from captivity. After more than seven years in hell, Cherry and Halyburton were going home.

Cherry attended the National War College in Washington and later worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1981. In July 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Cherry to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Advisory Board. He later became CEO of Cherry Engineering and Support Services and director of SilverStar Consulting. In 1999, Cherry was featured in a public television documentary, “Return with Honor,” narrated by Tom Hanks. The film looked at the American POW experience in Vietnam.

Halyburton completed his graduate work in journalism at the University of Georgia and was assigned to work at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from the Navy in 1984 with the rank of commander. Halyburton stayed at the Naval War College, teaching various subjects including strategy and policy and the Military Code of Conduct.

Cherry and Halyburton remained lifelong friends. They often gave talks together on their experiences in Vietnam. Cherry died of cardiac disease on Feb. 16, 2016. Two years later, his hometown honored Cherry by naming a Suffolk middle school after him. Cherry is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was laid to rest with full military honors. Halyburton resides in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Martha, and their three children.

Daniel Ramos is a freelance writer who focuses on military history topics. He has written Fighting for Honor, about the roles of five ethnic groups in the military, currently being edited for publication. Ramos works at September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York as an interpretive guide/educator.

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

Green grows the jungle, bright is the dew
Sorry I am that I can’t get to you
Until our next meeting, here’s what we’ll do
We’ll change that red Sun, 
to the Red, White and Blue!

HECTOR JOHN POLLA, C.1942

I FIRST READ these words in one of a dozen remarkable notebooks that came to me in a large envelope some years ago. I had been aware of their author, a lieutenant in the 57th Infantry Regiment named Hector John Polla, as I’d written about him in my book, Black ’41: The West Point Class of 1941 and the American Triumph in World War II, which told the story of the class that had graduated literally into World War II. Among those 424 men, I had been especially captivated by the stories of Polla and two others who had been the first to face the enemy in ground combat. Polla, along with Californian Ira B. Cheaney and Floridian Alexander R. Nininger, were soldiers who had fought and been decorated in desperate battles on the front lines of the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula long before most of their classmates had gone overseas.

With those notebooks in hand, Hector Polla now seemed much more real to me. They contained the words—prose, poetry, and meticulous checklists—he had penciled in the months after he was captured by the Japanese on Bataan in April 1942. Polla’s nephew, John Giorza, and his wife Jane had read my book and wanted to share with me the journals Polla had kept while in the infamous Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. I copied them and returned the originals to the family.

Some of the notebooks were tiny, vest-pocket ones, the kind that are easy to conceal—which almost certainly was what he did while imprisoned. Others were regular-sized school notebooks with the logo of the Philippine Commonwealth Bureau of Education on the front that the Japanese had probably pilfered and then sold to prisoners at the camp commissary. Polla used them to record the rules of card games in great detail and to jot notes in the Japanese language classes he took, probably voluntarily. He also recorded most of his poetry in the larger notebooks.

A few months ago, I ran across my copies of the notebooks. I looked again at the 1941 Howitzer—West Point’s yearbook—and at the photo of an earnest young man well-liked for having “lightened many tasks with his cheerful manner.” I reread the citation for his action on February 9, 1942, that earned him a Silver Star. It told of the lives he saved and the position that would not have been held without his bravery. Looking back, this citation is all the more poignant, for we know that the strategic situation for those troops in that place was hopeless, and that their short-term future held defeat, the hellish Bataan Death March, and imprisonment.

All-American Boy

HECTOR POLLA grew up in Pulaski County, Missouri. His parents, Lodovico “Vico” and Maddelina, were Italian immigrants; Vico worked as a gardener. Hector was an average kid: He had a paper route and liked to go fishing. In high school, he went out for basketball and football, and played clarinet in the band. After high school, Hector spent two years at the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, before earning an appointment to West Point. Marcellus Hartman, a high school classmate of Hector’s, later told John Giorza: “I think it went through Vico’s mind that here I am a gardener…and my son is graduating from the U.S. Military Academy.”

After Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, Polla, along with Cheaney and Nininger, arrived in the Philippines and joined the 57th Infantry Regiment on November 20, 1941. With its tropical setting and low-cost off-base living, the Philippines had been a prize assignment during the prewar years. Shortly after arriving, Polla dropped off a few dress uniform items at the Sanitary Steam Laundry in Manila to be cleaned and pressed, and settled in to savor the life of a young officer in the exotic Orient.

But he and his two classmates had little time for this. On December 8, as the attack on Pearl Harbor was underway across the International Dateline, the Japanese struck the Philippines. Two days later, the invasion began. Filipino and American defenders were knocked reeling, and within a few weeks the trio was among the outnumbered troops cornered in doomed Bataan. Cheaney and Nininger both lost their lives in January 1942. Cheaney was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross, and Nininger’s posthumous Medal of Honor was the first to be awarded to a U.S. Army soldier in a ground action during World War II. For Polla—promoted to first lieutenant on January 16—the Battle of Bataan continued.

On April 9, two months to the day after he had risked his life to hold the American line, time finally ran out, and the last line could no longer be held. The American and Filipino defenders of Bataan surrendered, and Polla became one of some 60,000 men to face the 60-mile Bataan Death March, enduring unspeakable atrocities along the way. Men were beaten or shot for stopping to get a drink of water or aiding failing comrades.

Finally reaching Cabanatuan on June 2, 1942, Polla and the others faced an uncertain future, with no idea of how long they’d be confined. Polla’s earliest notations in the small notebooks—generally undated—include lists of names and addresses of fellow inmates, the food they received from their captors, quotes from radio news reports listened to surreptitiously, and random thoughts: “Be sure roll calls are accurate”; “Camp Comdr. objects to assembles (illegal)”; “Excess rice in garbage pits to be reduced. Noticed by Nips.” His more systematic, day-by-day diary entries would not begin until the first day of 1943—by which time he knew he was in for a long haul.

POLLA’S EARLY ENTRIES paint a mundane picture of camp life, at odds with virtually all postwar accounts of survivors who told of conditions at Cabanatuan as being miserable beyond measure, with brutal treatment by its guards. On January 5, for example, Polla wrote: “Bridge. One banana issued. One pack American cigarettes. Traded Old Golds for Camels.” February 18 was marked by bridge and a “Jap inspection of clothing…worse than at school.” But it all turned out okay: he was issued “two new shirts and a pair of pants.” He ended his day by listening to the radio.

On March 17, the Japanese passed out fish oil for shoeshining and a ration of tooth powder “for every three men.” Polla goes on to say that there was “a drawing for drawers and towel. I got the towel.” The next day, between the bridge game and an afternoon nap, Polla notes being “issued three limes.” That evening, there was a “Musical Show” of the sort that alternated with movie nights several times a week through 1943 and, with less frequency, into 1944.

Looking at what he wrote—and where he wrote it—raises questions that will never be answered. Were Polla’s bland descriptions of bridge, entertainment, and citrus fruit toned down for fear of what punishment might ensue if his diaries were discovered? If so, one wonders why he penned his poetry, some of which contained descriptions of cruelty and abuse, in the larger, harder-to-hide notebooks. Were his bland descriptions simply factual details recited by a benumbed man who had accepted his circumstances? Was the man who “lightened many tasks with his cheerful manner” just trying to maintain his own sanity? John Giorza suggests that Hector undertook his writing projects and diary-keeping as a means of maintaining his mental acuity.

Polla’s diary entries rarely ebbed on the darker side. On April 6, 1943, though, he mentioned that he had learned from a guard that two men had escaped, but noted nothing of their fate. One rare graphic description of his captors’ strong arm came just a few days later, on April 14, when he wrote tersely about a man who had been caught attempting an escape. He “was supposed to be shot — Head shaved — spared,” Polla wrote. To this, he added: “Rat crawled on my head.” Is Polla perhaps telling us that he was the man whose head was shaved?

However, he pulled no punches as he wrote in verse about 10 men executed for the transgressions of one. “The ten they knew that they must die, altho’ for truth they knew not why,” Polla wrote. “Their life had run its brief short span. They were paying the debt of another man.”

‘I want to go home’

POLLA’S POETRY is often wistful in tone— such as when he wrote, “They write of the East as enthralling, and that’s why I started to roam. But now I hear the Occident calling. Oh Lord, how I want to go home.”

The theme of abandonment also crops up. In his poem “Scuttlebutt,” probably dating from the summer of 1942, Polla borrowed a line from popular culture when he wrote that a “friend of a friend of a pal of mine” told of a confidential report that “the Yanks and the tanks are coming. In fact they are almost here.” Indeed, since January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Army chain of command had repeatedly promised the POWs that help was on the way. Those making the promises knew it was impossible, but those in Cabanatuan at first thought that their incarceration might be short. Polla ended “Scuttlebutt” by writing that the gossip of “old maids…couldn’t keep up with the rumors in Cabanatuan.”

Polla wrote often of food, a fixation common to people on greatly reduced diets. Steamed rice was the staple, and the prisoners were also often served lugao, the rice porridge common to the Philippines. In their early days of confinement, they ate creamed corn and canned salmon, probably from captured American food supplies.

As the men of Cabanatuan neared their first Christmas in captivity, captured canned goods ran out, but the Japanese allowed gifts to reach the prisoners. Polla recalled that a delegation of “Manila Women” came to the camp with such treats as cigars, cigarettes, and candy. He does not say who these women were—although had they been from the Red Cross, he would have mentioned this, because he notes on the same page that International Red Cross packages with candy bars, soap, and canned goods also reached Cabanatuan ahead of Christmas 1942.

Through the early months of 1943, Polla wrote of eggs being served frequently for breakfast, and of oranges, limes, and Red Cross sugar often being distributed. On May 10, he savored “the first mango of the season.” Into 1944, Spam, jam, and canned corned beef arrived in Red Cross parcels. The men also maintained a farm outside the main prison compound. In his diary, Polla recalled raking cornstalks and being in charge of the camote (sweet potato) planting detail in the spring of 1943.

Polla’s weight, as an indication of his level of nourishment, declined from 163 pounds in October 1942 to 156 in February 1943 and stabilized in the low 150s through July 1944, the last time he noted it.

There was a hospital of sorts at Cabanatuan, overseen by a U.S. Army doctor, Colonel James Gillespie. Army Medical Department historian George Cressman has written that it “lacked the supplies and drugs to effectively treat patients.” However, Polla wrote at length about an early 1943 malaria affliction and that he received quinine routinely. He also often mentions other medications, including an antibiotic, sulfanilamide. In April 1944, he received a cholera vaccination and a month later he was back on quinine for another bout of malaria.

Aspirin was available, and circulated among the prisoners. “Valentine’s Day but no Valentine,” Polla wrote on February 14, 1943. “Stayed in the sack most of the day. Got 2 aspirins from Knopping.” This was his first mention of Warrant Officer Joseph Knopping, an aviation engineer from Palisades Park, New Jersey, who would play an important part in Polla’s story two years later.

Holidays in hell

THE JAPANESE regularly paid the prisoners small sums in Philippine pesos, which had a prewar value of about two cents in American dollars. The funds were kept in Japanese Postal Savings accounts. According to Polla’s running total—which reached 470 pesos by October 1944—he started out receiving five pesos monthly, but in October 1943, company grade officers like himself got a raise to 40 pesos. With their money, the prisoners were able to shop at the camp commissary, buying fresh fruit, canned coffee, toiletries, tobacco, and even fresh eggs. Polla was a regular consumer of sugared peanuts, which sold for 15 to 18 centavos a bag. Eggs fluctuated at a little less than one peso a dozen, about the same as the cost of a notebook.

Polla documented holiday celebrations. On Thanksgiving 1943, he reported having “had a very good supper.” Both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve in 1943 passed congenially with “cake and coffee.” On April 29, 1943, the men were served hotcakes for breakfast in celebration of Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. The same day one year later, however, was what he called a “Usual day.”

Polla did not mention his own birthday in 1943, but on September 30, 1944, as he turned 28, he reported eating cornbread and peanut butter. Easter 1943 was celebrated with a cup of sugar in the ration allotment, while on Easter 1944, he “attended sunrise services” and “broke out my new uniform.”

By his account, the Cabanatuan inmates stayed entertained. Performances by the camp theater companies and glee club occurred regularly in 1943, and he reviewed them. He deemed the glee club show on February 21 “very good,” while the variety program on March 6 was merely “pretty good,” and the film Tobacco Road on March 30 was “not too good.”

Movies, from the Marx Brothers to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—probably 16mm prints captured from American bases—were shown several times a week, often interspersed with Japanese newsreels. On September 12, 1943, Polla wrote “Movie — Judy Canova in Puddin’ Head enjoyed by all even though it was a second rate movie.” Ten days later, the 1931 Charlie Chaplin film City Lights earned a “very silly” from Polla. On October 21, he wrote: “Movie all in Japanese except a cartoon, ‘Looney Tunes.’ Cartoon only thing worthwhile.”

Reading Polla’s many movie reviews, like reading page upon page of a “bridge and citrus” lifestyle, is perplexing: it’s hard to square his journals’ account with the unanimously hellish stories of treatment at Cabanatuan that have emerged since the war. Was he trying to focus on the few glimmers of a bright side? Perhaps an answer to this question can be found in his penmanship and his language. By the summer of 1943, Polla’s handwriting had become more careless, as though he was running out of steam. His entries grew shorter, now usually being just one line. Indeed, for most of August, and sporadically into October, the phrase “Usual day” was repeated, with no further comment, day after day.

Letters from home reached the prisoners at Cabanatuan only sporadically at first, with a Christmas letter from Polla’s mother finally arriving in February 1943. Nearly a year later, in his January 1944 entries, he mentioned mail several times, noting that he received two letters in a day—one from his parents and another from a friend named Kay, from whom he received several letters. By June, it was a “Usual day” when 250 letters arrived at camp.

In reply, inmates were permitted to mail postcards with a 50-word message limit. Among those to his mother that survived the war, his card of July 22, 1944, said: “Don’t worry about me…send sunglasses when you can.” Perhaps his sanguine descriptions of Cabanatuan were in part designed to shield his mother from the anguish she would feel if she were ever to see his notebooks.

MEANWHILE, EVEN AS THE MAIL for the men started flooding in, the prisoners themselves began flowing out. The Japanese started pulling men out of Cabanatuan to be sent to Japan in “work details.” The most able-bodied of the men were, in fact, being conscripted as slave laborers, and were transported on vessels aboard which the conditions were so cruel and unsanitary that they came to be known as “hell ships.” Polla first mentioned a detail leaving for Japan on March 6, 1944. By the summer, the departing work details became more frequent, with the men often rousted around midnight to leave in the wee hours of the morning. Because they never returned, those left behind had no idea what they’d undergone.

Indeed, there was reason for optimism. By September 1944, as the prisoners marked 27 months of imprisonment, the fortunes of the once-invincible Imperial Japanese Army had ebbed and turned. Japan had been defeated from the Solomons to the Marianas, and General Douglas MacArthur’s promise of a return to the Philippines loomed large as an imminent reality. For Hector Polla, this was best recalled in his September 21 entry. After writing “Usual day” dozens of times, he was able to write “Unusual day.”

“American planes flew over,” he explained. “One Jap plane shot down — Excitement running wild…two planes flew low overhead at a high rate of speed. They seem to fly unmolested and at will… [I’m] Confident of early freedom.” He optimistically added “Probably have birthday dinner in Manila,” but that was not to be. On September 30, as he celebrated his 28th birthday, freedom was not his to grasp.

On October 15, it was Hector Polla’s turn to join a departing detail. His diary entry for that day, in the form of a note to his mother, was his last.

“Leave tonight at midnight. Giving [my notebooks] to Knopping to send on to you,” he told her, referencing Joseph Knopping, the man whose name had first appeared in his diary 20 months earlier. “I am in good health…. I don’t believe that we will leave the islands, but if we do you may rest assured that I will get along all right. I have been able to so far and I will continue to do so.”

Five days later, General MacArthur waded ashore on the island of Leyte at the head of his Sixth Army and the liberation of the Philippines began.

Based on eyewitness accounts later compiled by the U.S. Army, a reasonably accurate picture of Polla’s subsequent experiences can be pieced together. After two months at Manila’s Bilibid Prison, Polla was crammed into the filthy hold of the Oryoku Maru in Manila Harbor, along with 1,555 other Americans and 64 prisoners of war of other nationalities. On December 13, 1944, the ship departed for Japan. Two days later, though, like many Japanese ships in Philippine waters, the Oryoku Maru, unmarked as a POW transport, became a target of American aircraft. As it sank, 270 prisoners died. Polla was among the survivors who were reloaded aboard the Enoura Maru on December 27.

The ship reached Takao, Formosa (now Kaohsiung, Taiwan), on New Year’s Day 1945, and was still docked in port on January 9 when American bombers attacked it, heavily damaging—although not disabling—the ship and killing more than 400 POWs. But Hector Polla once again beat the odds.

On January 21, his luck ran out. His own undated poem, “Requiem,” provides a somber epitaph:

“God rest ye dead and rest ye well; T’is best ye be free’d from hell.”

Messages from the grave

IN JULY 1945, Vico and Maddelina Polla received a letter from Major General Edward F. Witsell, the U.S. Army’s soon-to-be Adjutant General, who wrote that their son had died in the sinking of the Oryoku Maru in December. In October 1946, Witsell wrote again, amending his earlier report to tell them that Hector had survived the December sinking, only to die on January 9, 1945. But this was not to be the end of the Pollas’ emotional roller coaster ride.

Official documents and letters to Vico and Maddelina, which John Giorza shared with me, show that the army had a difficult time sorting out the details of the men who died aboard the hell ships. The date of Hector’s death was amended several times in the years after the war as more and more eyewitnesses were located and interviewed, and as more Japanese records were located and cross-checked with other information. The final determination finally came on March 28, 1951. It was concluded that Hector had died in an attack on the Enoura Maru in port on January 21, 1945, that killed some 400 additional POWs and permanently crippled the ship. However, it was noted that his remains “could not have been recovered.” A grisly handwritten note added that after the disabling of the Enoura Maru, the “remains recovered at Takao, Formosa, [were] impossible to segregate satisfactorily.”

In the midst of all this, the uniform items that Hector had left to be cleaned at the Sanitary Steam Laundry in Manila in 1941 were picked up by the U.S. Army’s “Effects Quartermaster” and delivered to his parents. Maddelina Polla had taken her son’s death terribly. John Giorza was only four when she died in 1954, but he recalled that with Hector gone, “her life was over. She never left the house.” As for Hector’s father, John told me that “Hector was his hero.” Vico Polla carried the weight of his son’s loss until his own death in 1978.

Hector Polla’s journals had their own distinctive journey home. Late in 1944 Joseph Knopping learned that he was about to be transferred to Bilibid Prison, where many more able-bodied prisoners were being consolidated ahead of the imminent American landings on Luzon. Before departing, he handed the dozen various-sized notebooks to artilleryman Private Arthur Hilshorst. Both men avoided Polla’s fate: the U.S. Army freed Knopping from Bilibid in February 1945, and Hilshorst was one of those liberated by U.S. Army Rangers in the “Great Raid” rescue mission at Cabanatuan on January 30, 1945, that released the last of the camp’s inmates.

Hilshorst reached the U.S. Army’s Letterman Hospital in San Francisco in March 1945, and on April 2 he mailed the journals in a large single envelope to Polla’s home in Missouri. As the envelope arrived, Vico and Maddelina were still holding on to hope about the fate of their son. The parents later placed this envelope, along with General Witsell’s letters and Polla’s dry-cleaning, into the footlocker their son had brought home from West Point in June 1941. There they would remain for more than half a century. John Giorza told me that after his mother passed away in 1995, he and Jane opened the footlocker. They found Hilschorst’s envelope there, still sealed.

One of the most enduring yet baseless myths of the Vietnam War alleges that communist prisoners were thrown out of high-flying helicopters to induce others to talk. In my 21 years as a U.S. Army historian, I have never seen credible evidence that such an event occurred or that American military or civilian personnel participated in such practices.

I have examined all relevant material at the National Archives, including the files of the War Crimes Working Group, a Pentagon task force established after the 1968 My Lai massacre of innocent civilians to investigate potential war crimes committed by American personnel. I have also consulted CIA intelligence analysts who served in Southeast Asia and military personnel who conducted top-secret operations in Laos and Cambodia as members of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group.

Stories about prisoners being dropped from helicopters have long circulated in the Vietnam veterans community, yet almost without exception the storyteller says, “I heard that it happened,” rather than, “I witnessed it happen.” There is little reason to believe the handful of people who claim to have seen it happen.

Killing a prisoner of war in any way is a war crime punishable under the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to all U.S. military personnel. Anyone onboard a helicopter who participated in the act or failed to report it would be complicit in the crime. That liability extends to the ground crew, the air traffic controller and members of the intelligence team who interrogated those prisoners of war.

Trained intelligence agents in Vietnam would not resort to such crude interrogation methods. They relied on extended debriefing sessions in controlled environments where information could be cross-checked. No intelligence analyst I know would have supported the “helicopter” technique described in this myth. No member of the MACV intelligence teams that conducted interrogations has ever presented evidence that such a practice occurred.

Even so, it is impossible to prove that no communist prisoner died after an involuntary exit from a helicopter. In a fit of rage, American military personnel may have pushed one or more enemy soldiers to their deaths on helicopter flights back to base, though I have never seen evidence of that.

There is more uncertainty concerning the possible actions of South Vietnamese personnel, who sometimes used interrogation methods that were more extreme and whose military records still reside in locked archives in Vietnam. In one credible story, a Viet Cong female fighter, the daughter of a high-ranking VC official, jumped from a flying helicopter to commit suicide and thus escape the torture she imagined was waiting for her.

In short, the myth of the “helicopter interrogation” technique simply has no basis in fact.

Dr. Erik Villard is a Vietnam War specialist at the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort McNair in Washington D.C.

This article appeared in the December 2021 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe and visit us on Facebook.

The National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has created a Vietnam War exhibit as part of its Cold War gallery which is proving to be popular with Vietnam veterans and their families. The museum, which opened on Nov. 11, 2020, encapsulates the entire history of the U.S. Army in a 185,000-square-foot space with displays that emphasize the personal experiences of the men and women who have served. The museum staff combined artifacts, war-related objects, digital displays, cast models and pylons with biographical information of individual service members to create an experience that accurately documents the Vietnam War and brings to life many of its forgotten aspects.

“They [veterans] connect not only with the big things but also with the little things,” said chief of exhibits Paul Morando. “The feedback we’re getting is about the attention to detail.”

The museum’s Vietnam section “brings back so many memories,” said retired Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, president of the U.S. Army Historical Foundation. Schultz, a former director of the U.S. Army National Guard, has said that his perspectives as a soldier were forged in Vietnam, where he served as a platoon leader in 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, and later as a scout platoon leader. His numerous military awards include the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

Schultz appreciates the care and meticulousness with which the museum staff designed the Vietnam displays. “We talk to Vietnam vets all the time,” he said. “They all identify with the pieces of equipment that they carried. It’s personal for everybody.”

Schultz, an Iowa native, reported to his unit in Vietnam in April 1969. He was a self-described “brand-new soldier.” Although it takes a “short while to prove your worth” to an infantry platoon in combat, Schultz said, the men of his new platoon were ready to bond with him, which he will never forget. “From the day I arrived in my first platoon assignment, that platoon just adopted me,” he said. “They didn’t know me from anybody,” he said. “But I was their lieutenant, and they adopted me instantly—I mean, within a day. It was clear to me that they wanted to keep me alive as much as I wanted to keep them alive while performing our missions. It was really clear.”

Hopscotching across the country in a mechanized infantry unit, Schultz covered a lot of terrain during his tour, including in areas north and west of Cu Chi and across Tay Ninh province between Saigon and Cambodia. One feature of the terrain that looms large in his memories is the extinct volcano Nui Ba Den, the “Black Virgin Mountain.” Rising more than 3,200 feet from a flat landscape, the lonely peak is an ancient shrine steeped in spiritualism and tragic legend. It is veiled by cold, impenetrable fog at nightfall, and visibility on its slopes was reduced to zero in darkness, reported Stars and Stripes in 1969. A mere 18 miles from Cambodia, the eerie mountain became even more ominous in wartime due to its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where guerrilla activity was always a danger.

Schultz’s survival largely depended on his ability to learn fast in the field. “I was in combat the first mission, the first day,” he said, recalling his brush with the enemy in the small rural district of Dau Tieng. “We did the complete range of missions, from convoy security to defensive operations to offensive operations.”

Telephone calls to family were nonexistent, and care packages from back home were “a lifeline.” What really stands out to Schultz from those hard times are the soldiers he served with. “I was in a rifle platoon,” he said. “The soldiers around one another are the strength of those units. When you get in combat, you’re depending on every soldier in that unit to look after soldiers in their squads or in their platoons. That’s what we did. The soldiers that I served with were phenomenal. They’d never quit. I’m proud of those kids. They were really something special.”

Schultz proudly recalls working side by side on missions with men of the South Vietnamese airborne forces. “It was fantastic,” he said. “They’re superb soldiers—I mean, really courageous.” The Vietnamese paratroopers flew from their base in Saigon on missions all over the country, Schultz said, yet their contributions are often overlooked. He also cherishes the memory of his best friend, Lt. Corbin Tindall, who served in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and was killed in Vietnam.

Thus, for Schultz, the museum’s Vietnam War gallery contains much more than just objects. It is a place where veterans’ experiences can be honored and shared openly. A particularly special spot for Vietnam veterans is the gallery’s large three-dimensional map fleshed out with terrain features. It has become a gathering point bringing veterans, their families and other visitors together.

“There are any number of stories about Vietnam vets who have talked to nobody,” Schultz said. “In many cases we don’t know of their stories. We’ve had Vietnam veterans come here and tell a story about where they were across this countryside who have never said anything to their wives or to their kids before. So, for the first time in their lives, they’re now explaining where they were in Vietnam. On this map.”

Schultz encourages fellow Vietnam veterans to visit the museum to gain a greater perspective of their service and sacrifices within the U.S. Army’s legacy as a whole. “We had an Army before we had a nation,” he points out. “It’s the selfless service, selfless duty of millions who have helped save this nation.” Veterans who visit the museum “will learn how their tour of duty fits into Army history and how it connects with others who served,” Schultz said. “It all relates. From the first to last gallery, a veteran’s story is embedded in all these places.”

Schultz also believes that veterans’ family members, civilians and those unfamiliar with the Vietnam War can gain a better understanding of the war from visiting the exhibit and the other sections of the museum as well. “The Army doesn’t send itself to war,” Schultz said. “Civilian leaders send us to war. People need to remember that.” V

This article appeared in the February 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe and visit us on Facebook.

Japanese soldiers huddled in caves on the island of Saipan. Having survived a 15-hour banzai attack that left more than 4,000 of their fellow soldiers dead, they had retreated underground and were contemplating suicide. Then someone called out in their language. The person explained that U.S. Marines had surrounded them but offered safety, food and water if they surrendered. The Japanese had no idea the enemy offering them life that July 8, 1944, was a lone 18-year-old Mexican-American from East Los Angeles.

Born on March 22, 1926, Guy Gabaldon was the fourth of seven children. From a young age he shined shoes in his neighborhood to help support the family. By age 12 he was spending most nights at the home of his best friends, Japanese-American twins Lyle and Lane Nakano. Widow Sumi Nakano and her five children became the young man’s foster family. Over the next few years Gabaldon attended Japanese language classes with Lyle and Lane, learning to speak it with proficiency.

Their close-knit family life was shattered after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 consigned Japanese-Americans to “relocation centers.” Forced to leave home, the Nakanos were sent to a camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

Left on his own, 16-year-old Gabaldon sought to enlist but was refused for being underage. Undeterred, he tried to join the Navy on his 17th birthday but was rejected for having a perforated eardrum. Learning the Marine Corps was looking for Japanese interpreters, Gabaldon convinced a recruiter to overlook both his age and ear problem. He hoped to attend formal language training after boot camp, but a broken jaw from an off-base fight scuttled that plan. Following his recovery he was assigned to an 81 mm mortar platoon and shipped to Hawaii.

Determined to be a translator, Gabaldon pestered superiors until they transferred him to the G-2 (Intelligence) Section of Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. He was trained as a scout and observer.

In May 1944 he learned his regiment would be part of the Saipan invasion. More than 30,000 Japanese soldiers occupied the island, which was also home to tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. His first night on the island Gabaldon left camp without permission and snuck into enemy territory. Happening across a trio of Japanese soldiers, he ordered them to drop their weapons. One raised his rifle, but Gabaldon fired first. The surviving two surrendered.

Gabaldon’s commander, Capt. John Schwabe, threatened him with a court-martial if he left again. The next night, however, the headstrong private again slipped into enemy territory, returning with 52 prisoners. Schwabe reluctantly granted Gabaldon permission to continue his sorties.

That July 8 Gabaldon relied on a captured Japanese to convey the surrender offer to those hiding in the caves. Their commander accepted, and scores of soldiers and civilians duly turned themselves over to an outnumbered and overwhelmed Gabaldon. To buy time, he ordered the soldiers and civilians to separate, then to further separate the sick and wounded from each group. By the time backup arrived, the lone Marine had collected 800 prisoners. When his unit moved on to Tinian, Gabaldon talked hundreds more Japanese into surrendering. Posted back to Saipan to help track down Japanese holdouts, Gabaldon was seriously wounded amid an ambush and medically evacuated to Hawaii.

Gabaldon’s efforts on both Saipan and Tinian led to the surrender of some 1,500 enemy troops and civilians, for which he received the Silver Star. Actor Jeffrey Hunter portrayed the heroic Marine in the 1960 film Hell to Eternity. A month after its release Gabaldon’s Silver Star was upgraded to the Navy Cross. The “Pied Piper of Saipan” died on Aug. 31, 2006, at age 80. MH

This article appeared in the November 2021 issue of Military History magazine. For more stories, subscribe and visit us on Facebook:

Most war stories are about soldiers and battles. Rarely do we examine war through the unique bond between a man and his weapon—in this case the M60 machine gun. I was drafted on Nov. 10, 1965, and assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. I traveled to Fort Lewis, Washington, and trained there for 10 months before deploying to Vietnam as specialist 4. At Fort Lewis, every recruit learned to operate various weapons.

To my surprise, I qualified as an expert with the M60 machine gun, nicknamed “the pig” because of the size, weight and sound of the weapon.

At that time, an infantry company consisted of about 150 men. Each company had eight M60s. The machine gun was also mounted in the UH-1 Huey helicopter and other Army aircraft. It weighed 24 pounds, was 43.5 inches long and had bipod legs that folded down to stabilize the weapon when firing from a prone position. The gas-operated, belt-fed gun had a maximum rate of fire of 550-650 rounds per minute.

In the hands of a well-trained machine gunner, the M60 was a devastating weapon—so feared by our opponents that they usually aimed their first shots at the machine gunners, who were often in positions exposed to enemy fire. We were told in training that the life expectancy of a machine gunner was about seven seconds from the moment the first round was fired.

When I was assigned to the M60 in advanced individual training, I decided that if I had to be a gunner I would learn everything there was to know about the weapon. Soon I could take the gun apart and put it back together in the dark. To keep busy on the boat ride to Vietnam, my unit—Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment—held competitions where we took the gun apart and put it back together while blindfolded to see who could do it fastest. I won a few times, and even when I did not I benefited from handling the gun under stress. By the time we reached Vietnam in October 1966 I felt the gun had become a part of me.

Company B arrived in-country with four rifle platoons, and each platoon was armed with two M60s. The machine guns were numbered within each platoon. I was in 2nd Platoon and carried the platoon’s “No. 1 Gun.” I had an assistant gunner, Spc. 4 Paul Domke, who carried extra belts of ammo and fed them into the gun. Two of my closest friends in the company, Spc. 4 Bill May and Spc. 4 Charlie Ranallo, were on “No. 2 Gun.”

I personally carried 300 rounds of ammo at all times, one belt in the gun and two across my chest. My assistant gunner and my ammo bearer also carried 300 rounds each. I didn’t make a move without that gun beside me.

Our battalion operated at a base camp near Tuy Hoa in Phu Yen province along the South China Sea from October 1966 to January 1967. We had run patrols for about a month when I first saw action. I had yet to fire a shot with No. 1 gun and was hoping it would stay that way.

Then one hot, sunny day, while walking across rice paddies, we suddenly received small-arms fire from Viet Cong in some distant hills. Everyone in the company hit the dirt. We could not see any enemy soldiers, but we could see smoke coming from their weapons through the trees. Knowing I had a 100-round belt in my M60, I opened up on that hillside, my gun getting so hot that the barrel smoked. Suddenly I realized that my platoon sergeant was screaming at me to stop firing. I was wasting ammo and didn’t even have a target! I may not have hit anyone that day, but I am certain that No. 1 Gun kept a lot of enemy heads down.

After a couple of hours, the Viet Cong stopped shooting and melted back into the jungle. No. 1 Gun and I survived our first firefight. Together we had passed the test. I also earned a Combat Infantryman Badge, signifying that I had been actively engaged in combat. If it had been up to me, I would have awarded my gun the CIB too.

In the few firefights and skirmishes we had with local VC, the gun always performed well. No. 1 Gun became my very best friend. One afternoon, while Company B was still in the Tuy Hoa area, we received orders to gather up our gear and get ready to board choppers for an assault into a hot landing zone. The battalion was sending us to a village with a small river running through it.

Enemy fire greeted as us as soon as we landed near the village. Half of the company hopped off the Huey on one side of the river, and the rest exited on the other side. Both halves quickly swept toward the river to clear the village. Supported by a shoulder strap, No. 1 Gun was on my hip with the safety off, ready to rock and roll. As I made my way to the river, I saw a VC guerrilla jump into the water on the other side. A dense mass of elephant grass hung over the riverbank, and he ducked under it.

Anxiously extending the bipod legs on the M60, I added a 100-round belt to the one I already had in the gun. I wasn’t sure if the VC had moved to right or left, so I sprayed the elephant grass in both directions. I pumped 200 rounds into that riverbank. When the Company B units that landed on the opposite side of the river got to the bank, some troops reached in and pulled the enemy from the water. His body was torn to pieces.

“What the hell did you hit him with?” one of our men shouted. Proudly holding my M60 over my head, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “No. 1 gun!” Everyone laughed.

No. 1 Gun had registered its first kill. It was very nearly my last. As I was running to the river’s edge, ready to unload on the VC hiding in the elephant grass, I ran past a grass hut and never bothered to clear it. Lowering my gun, I turned around and noticed two VC sitting in the doorway of the hut, staring at me. One was holding a carbine. Startled, I quickly pointed my M60 at them. The man with the carbine immediately dropped it, and the two VC surrendered. It was the silent power of the pig, I suppose.

In January 1967, the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, was airlifted to Pleiku province in the Central Highlands. No. 1 Gun and I now faced a new and more formidable foe—the North Vietnamese Army. We soon learned that the NVA troops were very different from the local guerrillas we had fought around Tuy Hoa. They were well-armed, well-trained and knew how to fight. I had to rely on my gun more than before.

Over the next two months, we exchanged fire with groups of the NVA. On the morning of March 22, 1967, companies A and B of my battalion began a search-and-destroy operation along the Cambodian border. We were about 700 yards east of Company A when it was ambushed by an NVA battalion. Ordered to reinforce the unit, the Company B commander put our four platoons abreast of each other, and we marched west.

As we approached the battle, we heard intense firing. The NVA had wedged a blocking force between our company and Company A, preventing us from advancing any farther.

Hurrying forward with No. 1 Gun, I jumped into a small dry streambed with Domke, my assistant gunner. Sgt. Arthur Parker and Spc. 4 Joey Piambino were to my right in the streambed. The three of us had trained together at Fort Lewis and were good friends. I put the M60’s bipod legs down, lifted the weapon and positioned it on the ground outside the streambed facing the NVA.

Then I dropped back down in the streambed to organize our ammo. When I popped back up to put out some automatic fire, a bullet whizzed by my ear—no more than an inch from my head—and slammed into the tree next to me, shattering the bark. An NVA soldier had evidently spotted the gun and waited patiently for me to stick my head up. I never even got a shot off.

Terrified, I dropped down as fast as I could, pulling the gun and two ammo belts of 100 rounds apiece on top of me as I fell back into the dry streambed. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Still shaken, I grabbed the gun and crawled to the left inside the streambed. Eventually I found a spot where the bed leveled off and began firing on the NVA. No. 1 Gun, as always, thumped out a throaty roar as I fought desperately to push the enemy back.

To my right, Piambino had poked his head out of the trench to fire his M16 rifle. As soon as he did, a round hit him in the forehead, blowing out the back of his skull. I am convinced the same NVA soldier who shot at me moments before had killed my good friend, a budding doo-wop singer from Long Island, New York.

Unable to reach Company A, my company pulled back, formed a perimeter and called in air and artillery support. Suddenly, I heard my name shouted from the Company B command group. I picked up my M60 and walked to the center of the perimeter, where I found the company commander, Capt. Robert Sholly, standing with Platoon Sgt. Bruce Grandstaff and my best friend, Sgt. Bob Sanzone. The 4th Platoon’s single machine gun crew—the platoon had entered the fight short a gun—had been killed in the fighting, and I was to be moved there.

Naturally I was excited at the opportunity to join Sanzone, but at the same time I hated leaving 2nd Platoon’s No. 2 Gun team, Ranallo and May, without any support. More importantly, Grandstaff was very gung-ho. I worried about that kind of leadership style in the highlands.

I was still pondering the move to 4th Platoon when U.S. Air Force jets screamed over the treetops with canisters of napalm. Tumbling end over end, the canisters exploded in a white-hot fireball. The rolling fire burned everything to the ground and undoubtedly killed scores of NVA. The enemy fire ceased, and we made arrangements to collect our dead before continuing on to Company A.

Company B had seven dead, Grandstaff announced, and I was to take No. 1 Gun onto a small hill and provide security while others retrieved them. If the NVA shot at the group retrieving the bodies, I was to fire over the heads of the grunts and engage the enemy. That was a hell of a responsibility to take on. If anything went wrong, I could easily kill some of our soldiers.

Nervous, I set up my gun on the hill and loaded a new hundred-round belt. Flipping the safety off, I scanned the jungle in front of me. I prayed I would not have to fire over the heads of the 4th Platoon troops entering the draw to retrieve our dead. The group found the first man killed and carried him up the hill, placing his body right next to me. They kept coming up the hill bringing more bodies to me until all seven had been found. The smell of those charred bodies, blackened and smoking from the napalm strike, is something I can never forget.

We gathered the casualties and set out for Company A. The dead were placed on ponchos. I was told to help carry one of the bodies. I was already lugging around a 24-pound weapon, 300 rounds of ammo and a pack that weighed a good 45 pounds. Nevertheless, I swung No. 1 Gun over my shoulder, grabbed a corner of a poncho and stumbled off with three other soldiers.

Carrying a dead man some 300 yards through thick jungle in 100-degree heat was extraordinarily difficult. The body felt as though it weighed considerably more than it looked. I was constantly untangling the barrel and bipod of the gun from grasping vines and branches. The jungle seemed to want No. 1 Gun more than I did.

When we reached Company A, we placed our dead in the center of the two-company perimeter. In Company A, 22 men had been killed—added to the seven killed in Company B. First Sgt. David H. McNerney, who assumed command of the company when all of its officers were killed or wounded, was presented with the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony in September 1968.

I didn’t want any medals. I just wanted to get off No. 1 Gun before my luck ran out.

By mid-April 1967 I was pleading with the captain to get a replacement gunner for my M60 in 4th Platoon. My friend May, I later learned, was doing the same thing in 2nd Platoon. We had been carrying machine guns for over seven months. We wanted a break. Sholly finally agreed and stated that the next time we received replacements I could give one of them my M60. I, in turn, would take an M16 rifle, which felt like a feather in comparison. Soon after, Pfc. Joe DeLong joined the company, and Sholly informed me that he would be the M60 gunner.

I was told to show the new guy how to use it properly. DeLong had only fired the weapon once in training, so I let him fire off a few rounds to practice. Like most inexperienced gunners, he underestimated the power of the pig and failed to keep the barrel down when firing. After a quick lesson, DeLong became the new owner of 4th Platoon’s No.1 Gun. May was eventually able to hand off 2nd Platoon’s No. 2 Gun to Ranallo.

The next three weeks passed uneventfully. Then the tempo changed suddenly and violently. Shortly before 11 a.m. on May 18, the point squad in Company B’s 2nd Platoon spotted three NVA soldiers walking on a trail near the Cambodian border and attempted to capture them, but the NVA dashed off into the jungle.

Sholly injured an ankle, and 1st Lt. Cary Allen took command of Company B. He pulled the company into a perimeter and dispatched 4th Platoon to recon the trail to the west, while 1st Platoon performed a similar mission to the east-southeast. The two platoons were to advance no more than 200 yards from the main body of the company.

Moving west down the trail, 4th Platoon exchanged fire with a single NVA soldier, then a handful and finally a group of about 10-15 around noon. Our chase after the enemy unwittingly led us into a large ambush. In an instant the jungle erupted in gunfire. As the entire platoon hit the ground, I saw guys crawling back toward me. We looked for cover and returned fire the best we could. I couldn’t see DeLong and didn’t know if No. 1 Gun was firing.

Surrounded by an enemy battalion, our hopelessly outnumbered platoon waged a desperate battle for survival. Around 3 p.m., when Grandstaff realized we were about to be overrun, he called in artillery right on top of our location. A battery of big 155 mm howitzers blasted the tiny platoon perimeter, tearing trees out of the ground and hurling chunks of red-hot shell splinters through the air. It was a chaotic nightmare.

Not long after the artillery barrage ended, the North Vietnamese swept through 4th Platoon and executed some of the survivors.

I had been shot in the back early in the battle and was lying behind a log with two other soldiers. I watched in horror as four NVA soldiers ambled through the branches of a downed tree that partially concealed us. One of them gazed in our direction, lowered his AK 47 assault rifle and fired six shots. Two rounds smashed into a log inches above my head. Amazingly, the NVA men then walked a short distance away, sat down and ate lunch. After about 30 minutes, the four enemy soldiers got up and left the area.

The 4th Platoon survivors stayed put for the night. Company A searched in vain for the platoon in the dark and finally found the shattered unit on the morning of May 19.

Overrun and utterly destroyed, the 30-man 4th Platoon had suffered 21 killed and one missing. Of the eight who remained, seven were wounded. The man listed as missing was machine gunner Joe DeLong, captured along with No. 1 Gun. DeLong was later killed attempting to escape from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp in Cambodia. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star in 1974.

Ever since that fateful day in 1967, I have often wondered what became of my beloved M60. Was No. 1 Gun used to kill Americans? Was it left behind on some forgotten battlefield? Or is it on display in a Hanoi museum so curious citizens of that city can inspect a weapon captured from American “imperialists”? V

Victor Renza was sent home after he was wounded on May 18, 1967. Before he was drafted Renza had worked as a hairdresser for women in his hometown of Peekskill, New York. In Vietnam he cut the hair of everyone in his company for free. Back home he returned to hairdressing and got a job at Kenneth Salon in New York City working with top models and fashion magazine editors. He also worked on Jacqueline Kennedy’s hair pieces and wigs. In 1973, Renza opened his own salon in Peekskill. He retired in 2012 and lives in Delray Beach, Florida.

This article appeared in the October 2021 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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AMONG THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOGS that served in the Allied military during World War II, a few stand above all others for their acts of heroism. Chips was a German Shepherd mix who attacked an Italian machine gun nest on Sicily and helped capture 10 enemy soldiers. Caesar, a Marine Corps messenger dog, carried dispatches from HQ to the front lines and was seriously wounded by a Japanese sniper’s bullets. Gander was a Canadian Army dog who carried away a live grenade, saving a squad of soldiers at the cost of his own life.

At the apex of this elite group sits Judy, a white-and-brown English Pointer. She was a courageous and faithful companion, and the only official canine POW of the war. Given credit for saving the lives of many Allied soldiers and sailors, she proved to be the ultimate survivor under conditions that could only be described as horrific, imbuing the men around her with the hope and will to endure as well.

JUDY OF SUSSEX was born in February 1936 at the posh Shanghai Dog Kennels in that city’s International Settlement. She showed her proclivity for independence when, at just three months old, she burrowed under the compound’s chainlink fence and went feral, wandering about and foraging in one of Asia’s most frenzied cities. After a few weeks, one of the kennel workers discovered Judy and returned her home. Shortly afterward the men of HMS Gnat, a Royal Navy gunboat that patrolled the length of the great Yangtze River to keep the peace and control river pirates, adopted Judy as their official mascot. Judy immediately took to the crew, and they to her. Cared for by a succession of Royal Navy sailors, she reveled in the companionship they afforded.

In the days before ship-borne radar, Gnat was fortunate to have its own early warning device. Judy’s acute senses of smell, sight, and hearing, coupled with what one of her minders, Chief Petty Officer Charles Jefferey, called her “uncanny instinct for detecting threats,” would serve her and her shipmates well over the course of the coming war. This was amply demonstrated one night when pirates attacked the ship. The lookouts saw nothing, but Judy started barking loudly in the direction of oncoming boats. Rousted from their slumber, the British sailors defeated the raiders following a fierce gun battle. After that Judy became adept at sensing approaching enemy aircraft long before her human mates could, her noisy barks warning the crew of impending danger.

In June 1939 the Royal Navy transferred Judy and many of her shipmates to another gunboat, the newly built HMS Grasshopper, which soon joined the British fleet at Singapore. There the Grasshopper spent the next two years patrolling the seas between the great city-state and Hong Kong. Once war broke out in December 1941, the gunboats were ordered to Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Grasshopper left Singapore with 200-some refugees, among them soldiers, nurses, and civilian mothers and their children. During the voyage Judy romped on the deck and played hide-and-go-seek with the kids, helping to keep spirits high.

On February 14, 1942, the gunboat was steaming past the Lingga Islands, 140 miles south of Singapore, when Japanese planes attacked it. A pair of bombs paralyzed the vessel, and its captain steered the ship toward uninhabited Posik Island, grounding it 100 yards off the beach. All crew and passengers safely reached land, but Judy was nowhere to be found. Her shipmates feared she had died below decks during the bombing.

The survivors soon realized the acute peril they were in—they had precious little food and no source of drinking water. Petty Officer George White volunteered to swim out to the still-smoldering Grasshopper to recover any food, water, and medical supplies he could find. As he moved around the boat, he heard an “unhuman sound, part whine, part moan.” He tracked the noise to a compartment amidships, and there he saw Judy trapped under a large steel locker. He freed the dog, and when she got to the beach she scampered around, greeting her many friends.    

It wasn’t long before Judy noticed the lack of drinking water. She sniffed all around the ocean’s edge before settling on a small patch of sand, then began digging furiously, barking all the while. White went to investigate and as he approached, her paws exposed a bubbling spring of fresh water. “Water! Judy’s found water!” the sailor screamed. 

After five days the ship’s captain was able to make contact with the residents of a nearby island. With their help, he secured a fishing boat with a Chinese crew to carry the party across to the east coast of Sumatra, where they were expecting British Army trucks to carry them to the port at Padang on the west coast—their only chance at escaping Japan’s inexorable advance as it approached through the Dutch East Indies. But when they arrived on Sumatra, they were told there were no trucks and, with Padang as their intended destination, they’d have to walk 170 miles through dense jungle to get there. In mid-February 1942 the group commenced its trek.

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Judy seemed to take command of the march through the wilderness. As one of her minders, Les Searle, recalled, “She felt like the group ‘belonged to her.’ The way she acted was as though she was single-handedly responsible for their safe transit.” She adroitly guided them around marshes and over huge tree roots, all the while fighting off snakes and other menaces. On the second day the dog discovered a crocodile by the river’s edge. She moved in and started to bark. The croc took a swipe at her with his claw, opening a deep gash on her shoulder. Her bark immediately turned to a pained yelp as she backed away. Yet a few days later, Searle believed, Judy chased away a tiger that had been stalking the party.

It took a month for the refugees to reach Padang on March 16, 1942. Immediately looking for a ship to take them to safety, they were crushed to learn that the last one had left the port just the day before. The next day the roar of motorcycles announced the arrival of the Japanese army. The group had no choice but to surrender.

Their new home was an old Dutch army barracks on the outskirts of town that the Japanese had turned into a POW camp. Without enough food to go around, Judy took to hunting her own meals by crawling under the perimeter fence, much as she had done when escaping the kennels back in 1936. She became adept at catching rodents, birds, and reptiles, taking great risks with her nightly excursions as both her captors and the local natives had a predilection for dog meat. After a few months the Japanese moved half of the Allied POWs to Gloegoer prisoner camp at Medan, 330 miles northwest of Padang in northern Sumatra. Judy’s minders wrapped her in a gunnysack and smuggled her aboard one of the trucks.

WHILE JUDY HAD ALWAYS been completely dedicated to the many Royal Navy sailors on both Gnat and Grasshopper who had looked after her, she always seemed to be searching for a single human companion she could trust implicitly. In Medan she found such a fellow—Leading Aircraftman Frank Williams, a 22-year-old electronics technician with the Royal Air Force. A lanky, gentle man with wavy brown hair and a kind face, he had wanted to be a pilot but was too tall, so he settled on becoming a radar expert. His journey from Padang to Medan paralleled Judy’s, though the two had never met. 

That changed one day when Williams was eating his daily rice ration and noticed a dog staring at him. Judy eyed the newcomer warily, then began walking toward him. She stopped a few feet away, sat, sniffed the air, cocked her head, and watched him closely. Williams scooped out a handful of rice and offered it to her. Still, she remained seated. He then offered her his entire ration. She moved closer, and as he “scritched” her ears she ate hungrily. She then curled up at his feet. “I remember thinking what on earth is a beautiful English Pointer like this doing here with no one to care for her,” he recalled. “I realized that she was a survivor.” After that the two were inseparable.

The POWs fell into a new routine at Medan. Working parties were sent out each day to finish the disassembly of a local industrial plant. Judy often went along until her run-ins with the Korean guards reached a dangerous level. She hated her captors and let them know it in no uncertain terms. Her snarling provoked them into trying to attack her with the butts of their rifles. More than once their blows hit home. Finally, Williams decided to lock her up at the camp to keep her safe.

It was then, early in 1943, that Williams hit upon an idea to help shield his companion from overaggressive guards: he decided to have her officially added to the list of POWs. With trepidation he approached the camp commandant, Colonel Hirateru Banno, intent upon getting him drunk and plying him with the presentation of a puppy from Judy’s recent litter. To Williams’s surprise the colonel was amenable and wrote an order declaring the dog as “prisoner number 81A Gloegoer-Medan.” And thus Judy of Sussex became World War II’s first and only official canine prisoner of war. 

In June 1944 the Japanese announced that all POWs were to be shipped to Singapore. All but Judy. When the new commandant, Captain Nissi, first met the dog, he took an instant dislike to her. As the time approached to board the ship, he made it clear that Judy had to stay behind. So Williams devised a scheme to circumvent the officer’s order—he would carry her aboard in an empty rice bag. He spent hours training her to lay silent and stock-still in the bag. The ruse worked, and when the old Dutch freighter SS Van Waerwijck steamed out of Medan’s port carrying 700 POWs, dog and man were still together.

The Japanese had converted the vessel to carry prisoners by building racks of bamboo sleeping platforms in the dank, smelly hold. Just two days after sailing, a pair of torpedoes, fired by the British submarine HMS Truculent, slammed into the side of Van Waerwijck, tearing a huge hole that quickly flooded the below-decks compartments. Williams pushed Judy out through a porthole and into the churning sea. He followed, but in the chaos quickly lost track of her.

Williams was pulled from the water by a Japanese tanker and sent with other POWs to a prison camp near Singapore. Along the way he started hearing stories about a dog that had rescued survivors of the attack, and he knew that dog was Judy. Les Searle recalled that Judy had pushed floating debris toward men in the water and even let a few hang onto her back while she dog-paddled toward a local fishing boat picking up men. He remembered thinking, “Why didn’t the poor bitch shake [them] off, save herself?” Searle carried the oil-covered heroine ashore and hid her in one of the trucks headed to the prison camp, arriving a couple of days before Williams. When they got there, Judy went looking for Williams, combing every corner of the camp but turning up nothing. So she waited at the main gate for him to come. When he did, she knocked him to the ground and licked his face while he hugged her madly.

In late summer 1944 the Japanese army moved the Allied prisoners for the last time, assigning them to join in the effort to complete a 300-mile railway line through central Sumatra. Camp facilities were next to nonexistent, with food rations cut below subsistence level. Incidences of tropical diseases, like malaria and beriberi, rose at an alarming rate. Men began to die—sometimes as many as 10 a day. Like most of his compatriots, Frank Williams was no more than a skeleton. And Judy was not much better off. Writing after the war, Williams said, “She wasn’t that tame, obedient dog anymore. She was a skinny animal that kept herself alive through cunning and instinct.” Through it all the pair remained inseparable. “All I had to do was look at her and into those weary, bloodshot eyes, and I would ask myself: ‘What would happen to her if I died?’” Her survival became the driving force in his life.

After Japan surrendered in August 1945, British Army paratroopers went into the camps to liberate all the POWs. And then the long journey home began, though not without a major hitch: Judy was denied passage aboard the homebound troopship. But, once again, her friends smuggled her aboard and kept her well-hidden. Her survival story began circulating around the ship, and even before the POWs landed, the English media was onto the story.  This caught the attention of a British veterinary charity, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA).

When the POWs arrived at Liverpool, health authorities quarantined Judy for six months. It was the first extended period Frank and Judy had been apart since they met, and neither took it well. On April 29, 1946, Judy was finally released from quarantine, and the PDSA awarded her the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross (equivalent to the U.S. Medal of Honor). Her citation reads: “For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners and also saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness.” 

Judy became a media hit. “Gunboat Judy Saves Lives—Wins Medal and Life Pension,” a headline in the Daily Mirror blared. She and Frank Williams were feted around the nation, making tours of children’s hospitals and rehabilitation centers. During these events Judy wore a specially tailored RAF jacket with her campaign ribbons adorning her collar.

STIFLED BY the constrictions of life in postwar England, in 1948 Williams took a job in East Africa, both he and Judy settling down in southern Tanzania. It was a wonderful experience for the pair. Judy went on safari in the scrublands, battling with snakes and other wild critters just as she had done in Sumatra. In early 1950 she went missing for nine days. When Williams found her, she was seriously ill, and a doctor at the local hospital diagnosed a tumor. He operated right away, but an infection overwhelmed her body. On February 17, Williams was forced to euthanize Judy. She was buried in her RAF jacket underneath a marble memorial Williams built near his home. 

Down the mighty Yangtze, around the verdant Lingga Islands, across the dense jungles of Sumatra, Judy of Sussex, POW 81A Gloegoer-Medan, loyally, and often at great risk to herself, saved lives and inspired the belief among her fellow prisoners that survival, though difficult, was indeed possible—as she had proved time and again throughout her resilient life. Now, eight decades on, the enduring memory of her exploits is kept alive in books, magazines, and online articles. And every year a few hearty souls make the long trek to Judy’s gravesite in Nachingwea, Tanzania, to pay tribute to one of the most storied dogs of her generation. ✯

This article was published in the October 2021 issue of World War II. 

IT WAS THE MOST MISERABLE night of my life.

Hours earlier I’d bailed out of a burning B-17 somewhere over Germany. One member of Ole Worrybird’s crew was dead, another had jumped out before the rest and vanished, and our copilot had broken his leg upon landing and been hauled off by German soldiers. Now the remaining six of us sat cold and shivering in a horse stall, exchanging frightened glances. Sleep was almost impossible. German guards outside the door made sure we stayed there through the night. We cursed our bad luck, thinking about the rest of the 95th Bomb Group flying home to England and warm barracks. 

Ole Worrybird was the bomb group’s only casualty that November 2, 1944, damaged by flak and then downed by a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter after bombing one of Germany’s most dreaded targets: the heavily protected Leuna oil refinery near Merseburg, Germany. The German soldiers who encircled us on the ground had us gather our parachutes and march down a country road to a small garrison. There, our captors first relieved us of anything valuable, including the watch my mom and dad had given me as a high school graduation present. They also took away our fleece-lined flying suits, leaving us with only flight boots and our regular olive-drab wool uniforms. And they removed one of the two dog tags we wore around our necks. Then we had a meal of cabbage soup—cabbage would become a mainstay for the next six months—and spent the night in the horse stall from which the horse (and only some of his droppings) had been recently removed.

The next morning, with two armed guards, we departed on what turned out to be a five-day tour of wartime Germany, traveling by an exhausting mixture of bus, train, streetcar, and on foot, before arriving at our destination: the Luftwaffe interrogation center—or Auswertestelle West (Evaluation Center West)—near Frankfurt. Here we were placed in solitary confinement cells to await questioning. Just before a guard pushed me into my cell, I asked him if I could have something to eat, but he acted as if he didn’t understand English. I learned later that the guards understood English very well but were instructed not to communicate with prisoners—just to listen and report any information of value.

The purpose of solitary confinement, of course, was to break us down, to get us to tell everything we knew about the 95th Bomb Group. Then I thought: Well, this will be a good chance to just sit and think about things. And I did plenty of that.

ON THE FOURTH DAY OF SOLITARY, the guard opened my cell door and directed me to follow him to an adjoining office building. We passed a few closed doors before the guard knocked on one. A voice from inside said, “Herein!” (enter). My guard opened the door and directed me in. There, a large desk stood in front of a curtained window with warm sunshine flowing through. Behind the desk sat a smiling Luftwaffe officer dressed in an immaculate uniform. He was a well-built fellow, rather good looking, and appeared to be about 50. His light brown hair was combed straight back. Compared to muddy, unwashed me, the man was a movie star—an actor in a Nazi uniform.

As I entered his office, he stepped around his desk, walked up to me with his hand extended, and in excellent English said, “Ah, Sergeant Livingstone, please sit down.” He shook my hand firmly and gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. Then he walked back around his desk again and sat down, all the while with a warm smile on his face. After offering me a cigarette, he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a printed form of some sort and picked up a fountain pen.

He asked me for my name, rank, and army serial number. All that information, except for my rank, was on my extra dog tag, lying right there on his desk. But I suppose he needed to confirm I was that tag’s owner. Then he went out of bounds: he asked me what bomb group and squadron I was with. I told him I could only give him my name, rank, and serial number.

He smiled again, this time with a little expression of superiority: “That’s all right, we know you were in the 95th Bomb Group.” Of course they did. The block letter “B”—the 95th Bomb Group’s emblem—was eight feet tall on the tail of our B-17. The Fw 190 pilot who shot us down couldn’t have helped seeing it.

“What was your target the day your airplane was shot down, please?” he asked next, still smiling. Again, I said, “I can only tell you my name, rank….”

“Sergeant Livingstone”—he cut me off as sternly as my own commanding officer would have—“without your cooperation I don’t know how long you will have to remain here in solitary confinement, and you won’t be able to go to the nice camp.” He was frowning now. So was I.

He proceeded to ask other questions related to the military strength of the 95th Bomb Group, and to warn me that I was going to have to stay in that six-by-ten cell until I told him what he needed to know. Finally, after about 15 minutes, he pushed a buzzer on his desk and the guard came back into the room. The officer said something to him in German and offhandedly gestured for me to follow the guard out and back to my cell.

Two days later I was escorted back to the same officer. This time he was quite curt. He asked me all the questions for which he had no answers and again warned me that I wouldn’t be transferred to the “nice camp” until I helped him fill out his form. This interview lasted only about five minutes, and he gained no more information. Nonetheless, that afternoon, after five full days in solitary confinement, my crewmates and I were shipped out to the promised camp, about 45 miles north.

It was a transit camp run by the International Red Cross—with no German guards on the inside, but under the watchful eye of Luftwaffe guards on the outside. Here, after what turned out to be the last shower I would have for almost six months, we changed from our dirty uniforms, some of them ragged and bloodstained, into new olive-drab winter uniforms, new G.I. shoes, new underwear, knit fatigue caps, heavy overcoats, and wool scarves knitted by some dear ladies back in the States. That brown wool scarf and I became close friends for the next few months, through one of Europe’s coldest winters. 

We stayed there just six days, leaving on November 19 by train for what turned out to be Stalag Luft IV, near the Baltic Sea in what is now northern Poland. At one point on the four-day trip, our train stopped rather suddenly, and we saw the crew leap from the engine and dart into the adjoining woods. About half the guards fled there as well. At the same time, we heard the roar of aircraft above the tracks. We could see them—American P-47 fighters—when they zoomed up to make an attack on the nearby town. The train had a large “POW” insignia on the top of one of the cars and so was not strafed, but we could hear the boom of antiaircraft guns firing nearby. 

Sometime later, while I was gazing out the window on the south side of the train, we crossed an at-grade roadway. Beside the road I saw a little sign with an arrow pointing north. It read, “Merseburg — 10km.” That’s about six miles. Merseburg was our target that fateful day, almost three weeks before, when the Worrybird was shot down. I glanced out the north side of our coach and in the distance, across a flat plain, I could see the outline of the oil refinery. Beside the road I could also see bomb craters. I wondered if any of them had been created by the bombs I toggled out of our B-17. (I was the nose gunner and what we called the “togglier,” meaning I operated the toggle switch that dropped the bombs.) Whose ever they were, they missed by a lot.

ON THE FOURTH DAY, our train finally stopped at a tiny station at Kiefheide, near Gross Tychow (now Tychowo, Poland). My fellow POWs and I marched two miles to our new camp, built just six months before.

Stalag Luft IV—a camp for American and British airmen NCOs—was composed of four double barbed-wire fenced compounds, or lagers, A through D, with guard towers located about 200 feet apart along the fence lines. About 20 feet inside the barbed-wire fence was a warning wire, mounted on stakes about two feet above the ground. Crossing the warning wire made you fair game to get shot when guards spotted you. The camp was home to nearly 8,000 U.S. Army Air Forces POWs and another 900 from the British Royal Air Force. In each lager (I was in Lager B), 10 large barracks stood in military array; in each barrack were 10 20-foot square rooms. Each room housed 25 men—men whose part in the war was complete and who could only await its end.

During the day, we were allowed to roam free in the compound, but our guards locked us in our barrack at night while they patrolled the area with guard dogs. The double-deck bunks held straw-filled mattresses that lay flat and hard on the boards shortly after being fluffed up. My room—Room 10—had knotty pine walls that resembled what were later in the den in my Santa Barbara home. There was one casement window with outside shutters, which the guards closed and locked at night. Outside the shuttered windows, bright lights flooded the compounds. Anyone found outside at night would be shot on sight.

Near the door was a potbellied stove in which we burned pressed wood and coal dust pellets about the size of golf balls. Because we were given only a limited amount, we carefully rationed this fuel and used it only during the daytime, to keep the place semi-warm in that frigid winter. The floors were always cold then because they were built about four feet above the ground. This was to allow the guards and their dogs to look under the building to see if anyone was trying to tunnel out of the place. At night we went to bed fully clothed under a single German army blanket.

We received two kinds of food in the camp: Red Cross parcels and German food—usually some kind of soup—cooked in the camp’s central kitchen. The Red Cross food came in corrugated boxes about one foot long and six inches high. The 10-pound parcels provided minimum nourishment for one man for one week; we each received about a third of a parcel a week. 

All the Red Cross food could be eaten as is, or cooked, if heat was available. There were cans of good old Spam, beef stew, and something called “reconstituted butter,” along with cheese, powdered milk, dried fruit, crackers or cookies, and that all-time favorite, a quarter-pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate. The parcels also included small bars of Swan soap, useful for “spit baths” in our rooms and still more useful because of their wrappers—our only source of writing paper.

Thanks to the Salvation Army, we also received nourishment for our minds: the well-used library in our compound contained several hundred books that had been donated by people in the U.S. and Great Britain. Without them, there would have been nothing to read except an occasional German news-paper—impenetrable to most. The other main time filler was playing cards. A game called “Red Dog” was a favorite, and the POWs gambled with cigarettes provided in the Red Cross parcels.

Christmas at Stalag Luft IV was special. In Room 10, we melted down our chocolate bars and mixed them with crumbled graham crackers to make a sort of Christmas cake. We ate it while singing Christmas carols and thinking about our loved ones at home. It was a strange, ethereal moment when we all took a bite of our cake and realized, this was it. This was it for the Christmas of 1944. This was the opening of Christmas gifts at home. This was our Christmas turkey, goose, or ham dinner with family gathered round. This was the moment of thoughts of love for our moms, dads, sisters, brothers, and sweethearts. We all felt sure we would be with them the following Christmas, but we also knew that this bittersweet moment would live in our memories forever. 

NEAR THE END OF JANUARY 1945, we began hearing artillery bursts from the east as the Soviet army pushed the Wehrmacht back into Germany. On January 30, word came that we would be evacuated the following day to another prison camp. The Germans always did their best to keep any of their POWs from being liberated; in the end, Hitler wanted to use us for bargaining power. Early the next morning, our guards issued each of us a full Red Cross food parcel. To the crunch of frozen snow under our feet, the entire complement of Lager B—about 1,800 men—marched out of Stalag Luft IV to the nearby railroad siding at Gross Tychow, where we climbed into rickety old boxcars.

A thin layer of straw covered the rough wooden floor of our boxcar, doing little to make us comfortable or warm. A five-gallon bucket served as our toilet. The Germans locked 25 of us in each narrow car. Then we all sat down with our backs against the sidewalls and our legs extended—our feet meeting in the center, sole to sole. To use the bucket we had to step over and between a floor full of legs and feet.

As uncomfortable as it was, I found out later we were the lucky ones: Lager B had been the only one to evacuate by train; more than 6,000 men from the other lagers were made to march 500 miles in one of Europe’s cruelest winters. It became known as the “Black March.”

Two days later, at dusk on February 2, our train pulled into the Berlin railroad marshalling yard and stopped. I don’t know why—possibly to rest the crew. We were all asleep when, at 10 p.m., the scream of air raid sirens jolted us awake. My heart pounded; I knew that in that railroad yard at night we were sitting ducks for the Royal Air Force. We heard the drone of aircraft and the explosion of many bombs, and shook in our boots awaiting a direct hit. With the acrid smell of smoke and dust in the air, the raid seemed to last forever. But after half an hour the bombs’ thunder stopped, the bombers quieted, and an “all-clear” siren sounded. Our train pulled out of the station at dawn the next morning.

One event on that trip is burned into my memory. After we passed through Berlin, one of the prisoners in the boxcar ahead of ours developed a fever and became quite ill. The one medic on the train had nothing to give him but aspirin. We heard he died that night with an aspirin still undissolved in his mouth. The following morning the train stopped in a peaceful countryside area, and the man was carried on a makeshift stretcher to the top of a grassy hill about 100 yards from the train track. Under a cold overcast sky, a half dozen of his buddies buried him while the rest of us watched through the cracks in the side of our boxcars. It was a very sad time for us, with a lot of frustration and anger. 

After eight miserable days, our train arrived at the barbed-wire enclosed Stalag XIII-D, near Nuremberg, Germany, almost 300 miles southwest of Berlin. While we marched from the train toward the camp on a sunny, springlike February 8, we passed a column of about 500 American G.I.s, marching out. We shouted hellos, and they begged us for food and cigarettes. By talking back and forth as we passed each other, we learned they had been captured in what’s now known as the Battle of the Bulge—a battle we knew nothing about because we had no, or little, access to war news. 

Stalag XIII-D was a camp for ground forces, rather than air forces, like our last. It had no recreation facilities, no library, and no athletic equipment. The airmen of the German Luftwaffe had superior facilities and pay compared to Wehrmacht soldiers; that difference was reflected in the treatment of their respective POWs. It mattered little though; the spring weather was delightful. And two months later, we were on the move again. With the sound of American artillery coming from the west, my group of about 500 men walked out of Stalag XIII-D on April 4 and headed for Stalag VII-A, 75 miles to the south. We marched during the day and spent the nights in barns our guards had commandeered along the way.

As I sat on a barn floor in a small town in west-central Germany one morning, eating a piece of hard brown bread, one of my buddies walked up to me and asked, “Hey Livingstone, you heard the latest rumor?”

“What now?”

“President Roosevelt died.”

“Oh sure, and we’re going to be liberated this afternoon.” It seemed too far-fetched to be true. 

“I doubt that, but someone said a Jerry [German] guard told him the president died yesterday.”

We marched out that morning, in a drizzling rain. There was little talk among my fellow prisoners as we slogged along the muddy country road. We were all thinking about the president and our loved ones back
at home.

At noon my group came to a halt where the road curved around a low hill. I remember seeing the backs of two POWs as they trudged up the hill, through the knee-deep spring grass that made the Bavarian countryside so beautiful. One of them carried a bugle. The rain had stopped by then, but the sky was still slate-gray. The chilled air was heavy with the smell of damp earth and grass.

Finally the two men stopped and turned toward us. One of them, an officer, said in a voice loud enough for all to hear: “I have been told, and I have no reason to doubt, that President Roosevelt died yesterday, April 12. The sergeant will play taps now, and then we will have a few moments of silence.”

The sergeant raised his horn and played the saddest song I’ve ever heard. The sound was clear and pure, and I’m sure it could be heard for miles around that little hillock. I wasn’t the only one with tears running down my cheeks.

After the sergeant finished we all stood silently with our heads bowed, and I heard the unabashed weeping of a soldier somewhere among us. Then we marched on. 

WHEN WE FINALLY ENTERED huge, forlorn-looking Stalag VII-A on a drizzly April 16 afternoon, we were tired and relieved. This would be the end of the marching, and we’d no longer spend nights in the small-town barns of Bavaria. At first glance the 85-acre camp didn’t look too bad, but upon closer inspection I could see the place was rundown and way overpopulated. My group unrolled our bedding in huge tents.

The camp—near Moosburg, about 30 miles northeast of Munich—had been originally established as a Polish POW camp for 10,000 prisoners. But as the war neared its end, the Germans moved more and more POWs from all over Germany there to prevent them from being liberated by the oncoming Allied armies. By some estimates, as many as 110,000 POWs, including 30,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, were there. By the war’s end it was by far Germany’s largest prison camp.

Liberation came on April 29, 1945, when tanks of Combat Command A, 14th U.S. Armored Division entered the camp. We’d been hearing artillery for a week before and most guards had already departed, leaving just a skeleton crew behind, so we knew our life as prisoners was nearly over. POWs swarmed all over the first American tank to enter—but when a malnourished but determined-looking POW shimmied up the flagpole, tore down the Nazi swastika, and replaced it with the old Stars and Stripes, the camp really went nuts.

We weren’t going anywhere for a while, though. My diary entry for May 6 says, “Expect to be here all summer, ha. ha.” Finally, on May 8, we were up at 4 a.m., piled into the back of U.S. Army trucks, and rolled off toward Landshut, 10 miles to the northeast. About 10 miles beyond Landshut was a Luftwaffe base with a huge airport. For two and a half long hours, my group of 30 men waited, as thousands of American and British ex-POWs were shuttled out of Germany to Le Havre, France, in stalwart old C-47s. Finally our turn came. Bucking headwinds, the four-and-a-half-hour flight was the roughest I’d ever made—strictly white-knuckle time for all of us. After we landed at Le Havre, we learned that Germany had surrendered while we were in the air. What a great feeling. Now truly liberated, we were free at last.

Freedom is more than being able to leave home; it’s also being able to go home. ✯

THE PREQUEL

Bill Livingstone told the first part of his war story, “Worry Aboard Ole Worrybird,” in the October 2020 issue. It’s available online as “The Day a B-17 Gunner’s First Mission Became His Last.”

This article was published in the October 2021 issue of World War II.

An inside account of a bold raid to free POWs

In a variation of an old medical joke, the bottom line of Who Will Go: Into the Son Tay POW Camp is this: “The operation was a success…but the patient was a ‘no show.’” Author Terry Buckler gives readers an inside view of the meticulous planning, execution and disappointing outcome of the famous Nov. 21, 1970, Operation Ivory Coast, the U.S. Air Force-Army Special Operations mission targeting North Vietnam’s Son Tay prisoner of war camp 23 miles west of Hanoi. Buckler, a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, was the youngest participant in the raid, conducted to free the POW camp’s 65 American captives—who, unfortunately, had been moved to a different location four months prior.

This massive U.S. intelligence failure made the tactically successful raid an abysmal strategic failure, which provided ammunition to President Richard Nixon’s critics in the media and Congress. However, the planning and execution phases were outstanding, and all of those involved truly deserved high praise. The raid went like clockwork. Unexpected glitches inevitably popped up, proving the old military axiom that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” but quick thinking and instinctive reactions by the raiders and their leaders won the day.

Although several books have been published on this high-profile raid—Ben Schemmer’s The Raid (1976) and raider John Gargus’ The Son Tay Raid (2007) come to mind—Buckler, a Silver Star recipient for his actions that day, provides a collection of personal accounts, numerous photographs and informative articles that, when read along with one of the broader accounts, helps flesh out the historical record.

The words of the Son Tay raiders, their faces in photographs and insights gleaned from Buckler’s narrative provide a more complete picture of what happened in the Vietnam War’s most famous American raid. Who Will Go is not a standard historical account of the Son Tay Raid, although it covers all aspects of the operation, but it is, in effect, a comprehensive “yearbook” of the participants and their activities.

Finally, as Buckler’s book shows, the “successful” Son Tay Raid can be seen as somewhat of a parable for America’s involvement in the entire Vietnam War. Extremely competent and superbly trained U.S. forces, like those that carried out the raid, “won” every major battle they fought, but the “wins” proved irrelevant to the final outcome. V

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