News-Info-Alerts

Re: Ex- POW Passes

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: September 09, 2002

"Services held for ex-WWII POW
By Marshall Allen
Staff Writer

ARCADIA -- Funeral services were held Tuesday at Arlington Mortuary in Riverside for Edwin Francis Lindros of Arcadia, who spent more than three years as a prisoner of war in World War II.

Lindros, 83, died Aug. 21 of respiratory failure.

He was stationed with the 440th Ordinance Company of the Army Air Corps at Clark Field in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked just hours after they attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. After successive days of bombings, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. After a brief defense of Clark Field, Lindros and other soldiers surrendered.

During his years as a prisoner of war, Lindros is best known for working with two other men to sew an American flag from parachutes while imprisoned in Toyama, Japan, in 1945. The parachutes were dropped with food rations from American planes near the end of the war.

Lindros, who worked as a tailor sewing shirts for the Japanese Army, Paul Spain, and Joe Victoria made the flag in secret and then put it on the roof of their barracks, so American pilots would know not to bomb the building, according to Lindros' stepson James Stewart.

Spain has said in other accounts that the three wanted an American flag flying over the camp when American soldiers freed them.

Lindros received many medals from his service, including the Purple Heart, the Victory Medal, the Phillippine Defense Ribbon and numerous Bronze Stars.

After World War II, he moved to California where he became a carpenter.

Lindros is survived by his wife, Mary Ann Lindros, 72; daughters Darlene Mueller, Marilyn Kirkpatrick, Paula Stewart, Barbara Calyar; and sons Leo Stewart and James Stewart."