News-Info-Alerts

Re: Civilian POW Remembers

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: April 02, 2002

"Book tells story of WWII POW

by Jeff Hunter

Medals are hanging on the wall and probably always have been. After all, John Burton never actually wore a uniform on which to display them on.

While hundreds of thousands of young American males went off to war in 1941 as sailors and soldiers, Burton was thrust into the middle of the struggle in the South Pacific as a plumber and a pipefitter.

A civilian more adept with a pipe wrench than a rifle, he was hard at work on Wake Island when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And before the reality of war could even set in, he was part of it, fighting for survival as the Japanese bombed, strafed and eventually invaded the tiny American outpost.

Taken prisoner just 17 days following the United States’ entrance into World War II, the 28-year-old from Granger, Utah, spent the rest of the war — nearly four years — as a captive of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Somehow he survived. Now 88 years old, Burton lives in a comfortable home in Hyrum with his wife of 54 years.

But age is taking its toll. His body, once a solid 185 pounds, has been reduced to a weight probably even less than the 100 pounds he carried after four years of near-starvation as a POW. Walking is a struggle, his hearing bad and his memory worse, even though his book preserves a detailed, sometimes vivid account of his POW experiences.

“I thought all my troubles were over after I got back from the war,” he says with a hint of a smile.

Fortunately, in the mid-1960s, the father of three children decided he needed to leave behind a record of his experiences in World War II for his family. Badly injured in a motorcycle accident, he was unable to work for nearly a year, providing him with the time to type out, with one finger, a small, 131-page book titled “Traveling Life’s Twisting Trails.” The book is now in its second printing.

The book begins in Granger, Utah. Burton describes an ideal childhood full of images of corn popping on the wood stove, ice skating on a frozen pond and playing Tarzan in a big box elder tree.

But the double tragedies of his father’s death and the beginning of the Great Depression quickly took away his innocence, and rather than be a drain on his family’s resources, at age 15 he and some friends headed north in search of work.

After searching throughout Montana and Oregon, the buddies eventually found jobs in the small farming community of Rockland, Idaho. Burton spent a couple of years there as a hired hand, until an infatuation with a Utah girl brought him back to the Beehive State.

While the relationship didn’t work out, at the urging of a brother-in-law he took an apprenticeship at a plumbing shop and eventually learned the trade. After utilizing his new-found skills throughout the state of California, he came back to Salt Lake City where he fell in love with a woman with a child from a previous marriage.

“Because of what happened later, I shall call her Gretta,” Burton explains.

After moving his little family from Wyoming to Oregon and Idaho to Arizona in a span of a couple of years, Burton ended up in Los Angeles. While there, he came across a newspaper ad seeking plumbers to work for nine months on Wake Island. After passing plumbing and physical examinations, he signed “the fateful contract.”

“Little did I know I would be gone for four years, instead of nine months,” Burton says.

A tiny atoll shaped like an upside-down horseshoe and less than 3,000 acres in total area, Wake Island was an important military outpost as well as a stopover site for the amphibious airplanes of Pan American Airways on their way to the Orient.

Knowing that war with Japan was a strong possibility, women and children were evacuated from the island, and some of Burton’s co-workers broke their contracts and headed back to the mainland. A friend offered to lend John $100 for the trip home.

“But how could I go home like that, in debt and broke?” he asks.

On Dec. 8, 1941, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached Wake Island. Because of the International Date Line, it was actually Dec. 7 on the atoll and soon they would be attacked as well.

“About five minutes to twelve a truck came to pick us up for lunch,” Burton recalls in the book. “We were just about to board the truck when we heard a squadron of airplanes approaching. We looked up to see them coming out of a big black cloud, just off from our air field. Someone hollered, ‘It’s our reinforcements!’ Those words were just uttered when all hell broke loose! Those stinking Jap bombers blasted the airport, getting seven of our twelve fighters on the ground.”

Life on Wake Island would remain a series of air bombardments for a couple of weeks. But while the costs for the Japanese were high — according to Burton, between 6,000 and 11,000 men, 29 bombers and 11 ships — they eventually took the island when a lack of supplies and ammunition forced the American commander to surrender.

Although Burton and a small group of comrades gave up, he soon realized what he was up against when a friend was beheaded by a Japanese officer with a samurai sword for taking some food.

Soon, Burton and many of the other soldiers and civilians were transferred off the island and onto a ship, where they were crammed, 100 men to a hold, with two, five-gallon cans to use as latrines. Fed a diet of boiled rice water and one slice of pickled turnip, twice a day, many of the men died on the voyage to China.

Burton spent nine months there at a prison camp near Shanghai that had been built on top of a Chinese burial ground. The winter was cold and wet, and the summer hot and teeming with mosquitoes and malaria.

Food was scarce — “Each mouthful was like fragments from heaven,” he recalls — and in order to plant a garden, he and his fellow prisoners had to dig up graves and fight off snakes.

“What would a person do at times like this, if he couldn’t turn to the Lord,” Burton asks.

The Japanese, needing skilled workers in some of its plants, later transferred Burton and about 70 other men from the prison camp in China to another site on the Japanese mainland.

Early on in his stay there, Red Cross packages were sent to the camp, but promptly taken by the Japanese guards. Some prisoners managed to steal a couple of them back, and because they believed Burton to be the thief, the guards nearly beat him to death.

“I felt that if the hate in my heart could have touched them, they would have died instantly,” Burton writes. “It was several years before the effects of that beating finally wore off.”

For the next three years, that prison was his home. During that time Burton says he witnessed Japanese soldiers poking dying men with sticks in the makeshift infirmary, and had to bathe in the same water as 1,300 other men.

Lice and bedbugs were a constant anguish, and a lack of food led to more sickness. In order to supplement their diet — “How we wished for a good old American garbage can” — many of the men found ways to trade with the Japanese civilians for food. But in order to eat it out of sight of the guards, Burton says he had often times had to wolf it down while in the latrine “with one hand to eat, and the other to hold my nose.”

However, he describes with great delight a few instances in which he was able to do something to hamper the Japanese war effort, including putting together a steam system with concrete-filled pipes and swiping a small part from an engine that rendered it useless.

“I know most of us figured that the more we slowed the little yellow pigs down, the quicker Uncle Sam would come and get his nephews,” Burton writes.

As 1944 came to a close, the hopes of the American prisoners began to soar as B-29 bombers started hitting the Japanese islands. However, those attacks brought out mixed emotions inasmuch as they brought the war — but also the POWs’ lives — closer to an end.

“I don’t know how you would describe being scared and tickled at the same time, so I won’t even try,” Burton says.

Finally, after a massive incendiary bomb attack on the city adjacent to the prison, Burton and his comrades receive word that the second of two “new bombs” had been dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Upon finding out that the war is over, Burton describes it as “like a thousand Christmas Eves, all in one!”

After being released from the prison, Burton makes his way to where American forces are landing and hitches a ride to Okinawa on a C-47. The transport plane flew over the devastation at Nagasaki, then headed south.

“I felt like we were leaving hell on a magic carpet,” Burton says. “When I turned and looked back at Japan, my hand immediately came to my face and I thumbed my nose.” ———

Fifty-seven years later, Burton doesn’t feel much better about the country that kept him captive for four years.

“It’s simmered down a little bit, but not too much,” he says. “The citizens now should be brought to remember how horrible the American soldiers and people who worked over there were treated.”

After the war, Burton was broken-hearted to find that Gretta wasn’t waiting for him when he disembarked from a troop ship at San Francisco.

On the phone, she told him, “Jack, things aren’t the same,” and in despair, Burton, a member of the LDS Church who says he even fasted on fast Sundays while he was a famished POW, “patronized” some bars in the Bay Area that night.

In the midst of divorce proceedings, Burton says he finally broke down while he was home alone one night.

“My long pent-up emotions and this last mental punishment proved too much. I sobbed for about three hours before I finally got control of myself. I swore I would never let anything like that hurt me again,” Burton recounts.

But it was two more years of sorrow and heavy drinking before Burton says, “A beautiful hand reached into my foreboding darkness and helped me find my way back to sunshine.”

That hand belonged to Priel, an native of Thatcher, Idaho, whom he met in Logan in the fall of 1947. They were married on April 12, 1948, and went on to have three children.

At the end of “Traveling Life’s Twisting Trails,” Burton writes: “A loving family and devoted wife are truly God’s most precious gift to man. I feel well repaid for everything that has happened to me.”

Nearly four decades after he pecked out those words on a manual typewriter, Burton sits in his chair at home, and looking toward Priel, declares, “This is my jewel.”

Through the first 30 years of their marriage, the Burtons moved throughout the Intermountain West as he worked on various dam sites. While raising their children, the Burtons put down a “base” in Providence, then moved to St. George after he retired.

Now back in Cache Valley, the couple stays pretty close to home. They used to go to some of the reunions held for the survivors of Wake Island, but the survivors are getting fewer and fewer and John’s health worse and worse.

“All he eats is grapefruit and ice cream all day long, and he doesn’t gain a pound,” Priel says with a smile.

On the wall next to Burton’s decorations — the Purple Heart, the World War II Victory, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign and American Campaign medals — is a small plaque. Above an outline of an atoll, it reads “Wake Island Ex-POW.”

“Pardon my English, but that was the hell part of my life,” Burton says quietly. “It was pure hell.

“I told the story just like it was.” "