News-Info-Alerts

Re: POW Oral History Project

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 18, 2003

"Long silent POWs share their painful experiences in a Missouri oral history project

By LISA GUTIERREZ The Kansas City Star

He sits with them, these former prisoners of war, in their living rooms and at their kitchen tables, exhuming war memories long buried.

One by one Tom Miller is recording their stories for history's sake. Largely silent over the years, some of them unwilling to conjure the painful past, they are ready now to talk.

They're revealing their experiences for an oral history project that's already among the largest of its kind in the country.

And now, with POWs heading home from Iraq, who knows how many more will have stories to add to the permanent record, Miller said.

Miller, a manuscript specialist for the Western Historical Manuscript Collection in Columbia, has interviewed 68 people so far, most in the Kansas City area for the Missouri Ex-POWs Oral History Project.

For two hours he sat with Bernabe Aguilera of Independence, who described how the Germans seized him during a battle after D-Day. Betsy Heimke in Overland Park told how the Japanese treated her family while interned in a civilian camp in the Philippines.

And Stanley Tyron of Liberty recalled a march of POWs through the German countryside during the final weeks of World War II.

These accounts, told in former POWs' own words, are invaluable first-person resources for historians, researchers and educators, Miller said, which is why several veterans agreed to participate. "We're building history," one said.

"If we don't tell our stories, nobody's going to know what happened," said Aguilera, a retired railroad worker now 77.

Military conflicts since World War I created 142,233 American prisoners of war, according to the American Ex-Prisoners of War in Arlington, Texas.

Ten ex-POWs die each day as their ranks dwindle. In 1982 there were 93,000 alive; as of Jan. 1, 39,000 are left.

Miller estimates that fewer than 1,000 live in Missouri. Given enough time and money he'd like to record as many of their stories as possible. And not just World War II stories, but from all conflicts, through the current Persian Gulf War.

"There are so many who hadn't recorded their stories before they died and frankly, so many more who will die without recording theirs," Miller, 31, said from his office at the University of Missouri.

"It's understandable that some don't want to rehash it. It's too painful. Some have told me they've tried to forget it. In most cases they lived through combat, which was traumatic enough, and then had to live through the capture."

The transcripts illuminate the dark, unfathomable picture of captivity. But random, quirky moments pop up, too, such as when a German soldier told one POW that "we're at war. This isn't like eating an ice cream cone in New York."

In their recollections, many POWs still refer to their captors as the "Jerries" and "Japs." Hatred of the enemy was a drug of bravado. Some prisoners pledged to themselves that no matter the torture, they would give up only name, rank and serial number.

Time has not mitigated the brutality, most severe for prisoners held in Asian camps. Even so, one POW recalled the agony of a fellow captive whose tips of his fingers were burned off by their German captors. In agony, the man dunked his fingers into a can full of urine for relief.

"I will never forget that smell," the POW told Miller. The stench of war has lingered long and strong.

Prisoners did anything to get by and survive -- defecating into their helmets as they were hauled like cattle in boxcars, faking unconsciousness to avoid fatal beatings. Survival, though, sometimes was pure luck, because "the SS, hell, they'd just (as soon) shoot you as look at you," one man recalled.

Death, indeed, might have been welcome relief from the scourge of malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, beriberi and the discomfort of diarrhea controlled by eating charcoal. And the lice.

"You'd take your shirt off and find all the lice," said one veteran. "They congregated in the seams, and you had to pick them out and crunch them with your fingernails. They looked like little rice kernels."

To a man, they remember liberation day. "The man walked in there, he was an English captain," said one POW held in Germany. "He was about 6-foot-4, and he looked just like a John Wayne walking through the door."

Many of these stories have never been told before. "Or if they have, they've come out in fragments and usually only to family members and perhaps to other veterans," Miller said.

"That's one reason we've just been overjoyed by the success of this project. It seems as if, late in their lives, many of them are more willing to open up now and have their stories recorded."

Miller found it uplifting that many of the POWs he met have positive outlooks on life today, so much so that many seemed younger than their advanced years.

Only a few POW oral history collections exist in the country. The largest, by most accounts, is at the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Ga., home to more than 900 POW interviews.

Most are from World War II, Korean War and Vietnam veterans. Eleven of 23 POWs who came home from the first Persian Gulf War also were interviewed, said Alan Marsh, the museum's cultural resources program manager.

Visitors can watch video clips of some of the interviews, conducted by Marsh and others at veterans conventions across the country. "I've been here a little over 10 years and I still find myself stopping and listening, and I still get choked up. It's that compelling of a story," Marsh said.

"It not only makes you aware, it makes you appreciate the sacrifices that so many people have made for our country. That's not just words. That's the truth."

Miller's efforts in Missouri were inspired by POW memorabilia donated to the Western Historical Manuscript Collection by Lewis Wickens of Mound City, Mo. Oral histories seemed a perfect complement to the books, news clippings and other materials Wickens, a former POW, had amassed.

Wickens led Miller to dozens of former POWs in the Kansas City area, most members of a local chapter of American Ex-Prisoners of War, which published a book of POW accounts last year.

Miller set up the first interviews with older veterans; the average age of World War II vets is close to 80 now. That war produced more POWs than all others combined, Miller said.

He soon found that that generation had largely kept its past to itself. In war they did what they needed to do and moved on with their lives when they returned.

Betsy Heimke, 73, the only civilian Miller has interviewed, said she didn't talk about her family's three-year captivity in the Philippines because she just wanted to get back to normal life.

"In my instance I was a 15-year-old teen-ager when we were liberated, and we were absolutely intoxicated with the joy of freedom," Heimke said. Her parents went to the Philippines as schoolteachers and were living there when the family was taken prisoner in 1941.

"I came back and entered high school and just wanted to meld with the kids. And I think that for the men, the GIs, their experience really was so much worse than ours that they wanted to forget it. So they shoved it under the rug."

Shame kept Bernabe Aguilera from speaking about his POW days. He was a 19-year-old from Kansas City, Kan., when he went to war.

On Dec. 16, 1944, after a morning and afternoon of heavy fighting in the Ardennes Forest, his unit ran out of ammunition. Aguilera's lieutenant yelled "fix bayonets," but they were useless with more than 100 Germans charging toward them.

The lieutenant raised a white flag in surrender, and Aguilera didn't speak of that day because "I got captured. I gave up."

Aguilera told about scrounging bread and potatoes while on work detail outside the camp. Their German captors would frisk them upon their return, and the best way to sneak things in was to scratch themselves like they had lice.

"You'd start scratching like a monkey, and... he (the guard) would say `Raus! Raus! Get away from me,' " Aguilera said. "And if we had bread or potatoes, we got away with it."

Finding compatriots in American Ex-Prisoners of War "took the tension out of life," Aguilera said. "When you talked to them they understood exactly what you went through because they went through the same thing."

It's easier for POWs to talk amongst themselves, said Ed Slater of Independence, who works with former POWs like himself who meet every week at the VA Hospital in Kansas City.

"They'll talk about it in a group or to each other. But most people that we talk to, when you tell them your story, they don't really believe it, I think," said Slater, 72, who talked to Miller about his life after the Korean War but declined to discuss his captivity.

"They don't believe that things like that could happen. So that kind of turns the guys off, and they don't want to talk to somebody who doesn't believe what they say anyway."

Some POWs share their stories in schools and community groups, but even that can be difficult. Kids want to know where prisoners went to the toilet, what they ate. "Very seldom do they ask if you were beaten or tortured," Slater said. "I think they don't even want to hear that so they don't ask."

Slater was part of a four-month death march after his capture. At the end their Korean captors lined up the American soldiers and shot them. Three out of 287 men survived, including Slater, because they played dead.

When Slater returned to Illinois, his hometown newspaper interviewed him, but that was the end of it. "Nobody else really asked me what it was like. I have seven brothers and five sisters. One of them might have asked me."

Now, someone has.

To reach Lisa Gutierrez, features reporter, call (816) 234-4987 or send e-mail to lgutierrez@kcstar.com.

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