Re: 8th POW Added to Hiroshima A-Bomb List

Date: June 22, 2004

"8th GI to be added to A-bomb list

Yomiuri Shimbun

At the request of former U.S. military personnel, a U.S. serviceman is to be added to a list of atomic bomb victims killed in Hiroshima.

War veteran Hap Halloran of California, 82, visited Hiroshima City Hall on Monday and applied, with the help of city historian Shigeaki Mori, to have U.S. Sgt. Julius Molnar added to the the city's official list of A-bomb victims.

Molnar will be the eighth U.S. serviceman on the list.

According to Mori, Molnar was a B-24 bomber crew member during World War II. The 20-year-old sergeant was detained in Hiroshima as a prisoner of war at the time of the bombing.

Molnar's family asked Mori to add his name to the list, so Mori invited a friend, Halloran, to Hiroshima to make the application on behalf of the deceased man's family.

Halloran's fighter plane was shot down over Tokyo in January 1945. He began communicating with former Japanese soldiers in 1984. This was his ninth visit to Japan. Halloran said he felt a powerful sense of history adding Molnar's name to the list 59 years after the end of the war.

Halloran submitted photographs of Molnar and another U.S. soldier killed in the bombing, who was already on the list, to the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims in the city's Naka Ward.

©2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun "