POWs leave legacy of heroism
By: AGNES DIGGS - Staff Writer
Nancy Millett Zelenack had the parental role models of a lifetime. Both her dad and stepmother stood in the path of the Axis powers arrayed against the Allies in World War II. Both saw the blood and terror of combat. Both were captured by the enemy.
George Van Millett Jr. served in the European theater, and Sally Blaine, who later became his wife, served in the Pacific. But it was a long time before Zelenack, who lives in Escondido with her husband, Robert, understood that her parents were genuine heroes.
"Mom used to talk about her girlfriends and what they did in the prison camp," Zelenack said. "But when you're 10 years old, you don't know what a prison camp is."
Millett's name is carved on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., and he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Someday Sally, now 89 and living in San Antonio, Texas, will join him there.
A prisoner's story
With the help of treasured family scrapbooks, historical records and the recollections of Sally Blaine-Millett, the survivor, here is their story.
Sally Blaine was born in Bible Grove, Mo., the 10th of 12 children. She graduated from nursing school in San Diego, and joined the military for the chance to see faraway places like Shanghai and Hong Kong. She arrived in the Philippines on June 6, 1941, and was sent to Fort Stotsenberg Station Hospital, 75 miles north of Manila, for her first duty.
On Dec. 8, she learned of the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That same day, all hell broke loose around her as the enemy began bombing the base. Blaine and her compatriots were ordered to evacuate. Their flight from danger led them to Manila. She was then ordered to Bataan to work in a jungle hospital that had no door, no ceilings, no floor, no windows ---- just beds on the ground outdoors, she said. She slept in a tent and worked 12 hours a day.
"I had 400 patients in my ward," she said. "There were about 200 beds and the rest on the ground."
She recalled the scene and the 2,000 battle casualties around her. "And I thought, 'I'm like Scarlett O'Hara in the railroad scene,'" she said. "I'll never forget that. Some took off their jackets and lay down and put their heads on them. Others lay on the ground. We had men who had been shot and paralyzed. They had broken arms and legs. I was the charge nurse with one nurse working under me."
The Japanese continued to advance. On April 8 ---- one day before the fall of Bataan ---- the nurses were ordered to Corregidor.
They were taken to the harbor for evacuation across the bay. But the vehicle carrying Blaine and four other women ran out of gas. They began walking and were picked up by two airmen who had room for three inside and one on the running board. The fifth woman volunteered to walk the rest of the way, and reached Corregidor at about 3:30 in the morning, the first nurse from their hospital to do so.
When Blaine's group arrived at the harbor, there was mass confusion, she said. Eventually they were taken across the bay to the Malinta Tunnel Hospital, which was little more than a series of claustrophobic tunnels blasted into a mountain. The area was heavily bombed by Japanese forces. The women lived and worked inside.
Surrender
On May 6, seeing no other recourse, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered his starving and exhausted troops to the Japanese.
Blaine and the nurses with her were sent to Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, arriving on Sept. 8, 1942. Other nurses were already there. The captives ----- eventually 67 in all ---- remained prisoners until American troops liberated them in February 1945.
Blaine's mother didn't know where she was until about two months before the war ended, she said. "They sent me nine letters from home, but I only sent three because I didn't trust them (her captors)."
She was held there for 30 1/2 months, under harsh living conditions. The women slept in a room with 17 beds placed one foot apart. They worked split shifts in the daytime because of the oppressive heat: Night duty began at 6 p.m. and ended at 7 the next morning.
The women were carefully guarded. None were molested, she said.
But food was scarce. Prisoners got a morning ration of rice that got wormier and wormier as time went on, she said.
"You had worms in your rice, and you picked them out and went on eating," Blaine said. "We were hungry. The men ate the worms."
The evening meal was watery stew with a green vegetable that was slimy, like okra, mixed with a bit of meat. Their gear consisted of a tin plate, a cup and a spoon.
Red Cross packages arrived, but the Japanese looted them of cigarettes and withheld them so long that the chocolate they contained became moldy.
"But we ate it anyway, because we were so hungry for chocolate," she said. "It took 20 years for the smell of mold to get out of my nostrils when I smelled a piece of chocolate candy."
Enduring imprisonment
The prisoners lost substantial weight on the sparse diet, and the women stopped having periods. Many suffered from malaria and other tropical diseases.
Blaine said she endured by thinking of her mother.
"My mother had more guts than any man I've ever known," she said. "She wasn't brazen. She just didn't fall back. And I could do the same. She stood up under terrible pressure and never gave in to crying spells. And I didn't cry either, except when I had malaria."
She also learned from the example of their chief nurse, Josie Nesbit, soft-spoken and strong, who coached her to be the same.
When American tanks knocked down the gates and liberated the camp, all the nurses had managed to survive.
When Blaine was captured, she had her orders, a comb, a lipstick, a toothbrush and maybe a powder puff in her pocket, she said. Toward the end, she put them to good use.
"As this thing started to wrap up," she said. "I thought I had to start taking care of my appearance. You want to put your best foot forward."
After liberation, the nurses received Bronze Stars for meritorious service and a one-step promotion. Blaine received the rank of second lieutenant on her birthday. She had been held captive for 1,003 days. She was sure of that, she said, because the Army paid her a dollar per day subsistence and her salary, which was waiting for her when she got home.
"We didn't know what was going to happen to us," she recalled about their homecoming. "We thought we were going to be court-martialed. Imagine that."
When people speak of World War II, they automatically think Europe, she said. "POWs in Europe were treated much better than those held by the Japanese. Their death march was in the snow, and ours was in the scalding heat."
Blaine returned to the States to recuperate, but her R&R turned into rest, relaxation and romance when she attended a party and was introduced to a handsome colonel she had seen on an elevator a few days earlier. They danced, she said. He was a good dancer. It was love at first sight. They were married in a chapel in Fort Meyers, Ga. A nurse was her maid of honor.
"I was the oldest person in the family to get married," she said. "They thought I was going to be an old maid. I was 31. They thought I was a goner."
No ordinary man
And it was no ordinary man she married.
George Van Millett Jr., a West Point graduate, organized, trained and commanded the 507th parachute infantry. On D-Day, he parachuted into France with his troops, landing near Appeville. Three days later, luck turned against them, and he was captured and imprisoned in Oflag 64, a German POW camp for officers in Poland. He spent seven months there before escaping. He made his way through Odessa and eventually made it home, where he was debriefed and sent to Miami for a little R&R.
He later served as an attache with Ralph Bunche and the United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon.
The couple had two sons, George, named after his father, and William.
Millett died in 1955 at age 51, 11 months after witnessing the detonation of an atomic bomb at a test site.
Sally Blaine Millett later earned a political science degree from Washburn University in Kansas, a freshman when her son was a senior.
'It made me feel so proud'
The couple's daughter, Nancy Millett Zelenack, said she didn't think of her parents as heroes, but as people who were part of something very important. She went with Sally to a reunion of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, and when her mom's name was called, the group gave the survivor a standing ovation.
"Everyone in that auditorium just clapped," Zelenack said. "And Mom cried. It made me feel so proud of her. I didn't realize that she was that much of a hero."
Beginning in 1995, Sally Blaine Millett gave Zelenack scrapbooks containing information about her dad's accomplishments. They contain "anything that was important to or pertaining to his military career," she said. The information begins in 1945. And thus she learned more about her father's heroism and the people he served with.
"My mom kept everything," she said. "If she didn't, we wouldn't have the wonderful history that we have now."
Millett was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry along with 10 other medals and rose to the rank of colonel. Sally Blaine Millett reached the rank of captain and received 10 medals in addition to her Bronze Star. But her favorite is the one she received in 1988 ---- her Prisoner of War medal, she said.
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