When my father was liberated from a Japanese POW camp at the end of World War II, he weighed about ninety pounds—scrawny for any man, but skeletal for someone 6 ft. 3 in. tall. For 39 months of a cruel captivity, he had endured two hellship voyages, a submarine attack, starvation, countless beatings, forced labor, disease, psychological abuse, isolation, and six months of Allied bombing raids that devastated Tokyo, obliterated his prison camp, and killed many of his friends.
Aboard the hospital ship to which he was taken in Tokyo Bay in August 1945, he decided to leave behind his duffel bag because it contained everything he wanted to forget about the ordeal. But from port to port on his way home, the duffel bag kept showing up until he finally gave up trying to lose it. And when at last he opened it in the living room of his parents’ home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there on top were the two cloth-covered books a fellow prisoner had given him to read: The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
Dad’s individual prisoner of war photograph from Kawasaki Camp 2B.
Throughout my childhood, Dad said very little about his captivity. It was a ponderous mystery wrapped in silence. And because he was often preoccupied with flashbacks and aftershocks that surfaced without summons and lingered without welcome, the silence could be heavy with gloom. I dared not ask about it lest my questions plunge him back into the abyss that gaped beside the sunshine of my youth. Dad fought and labored mightily to keep the aftershocks from blighting our lives, and through it all, I never doubted his love for me.
From time to time, men who had been Dad’s companions in those dark years of unutterable misery would cross our threshold. Or Dad would stop in some out-of-the-way town during a family vacation, and Mother and I would wait in the car while he looked up a name in a phone book and called to ask whether so-and-so was, in fact, someone he had known in the Philippines or in a terrible place called Kawasaki.
There was forever-skinny Warren Stewart—ironically nicknamed “Stew”—who, as a fellow prisoner, bent all his memory and imagination to assuaging sleepless hunger by etching the outside of his mess kit with the name of every food he could recall. And in a pocket diary he diverted himself from starvation by inventing not only lists and menus and recipes, but family get-togethers he could not—and might never—be present for again.
There was Doc Curtin, a young naval officer and surgeon from Great Britain who had been captured in the Indian Ocean; Doc who was beaten repeatedly by the guards at the camp because he refused to let them send diseased and injured prisoners to their deaths on work details.
There was John Britton who saved Dad’s life during bombing raids near war’s end. And there was John Seres, who, for some forgotten infraction of camp rules, was forced to climb down into the darkness below a manhole cover and stand bent-over in filth flowing beneath the street; and yet had bested the guards in their cruel sport.
Most of all, however, there was Jim Nelson, a Utah boy, whose name was revered because it was Jim to whom Dad talked one day about the want of something new to read. Jim said he had a book, but it was about religion. I don't care, said Dad, I'll read anything.
Eleven years after the war, Mother and Dad joined the Church. Eventually, I came to understand the connection between the Book of Mormon and the darkness in Dad's past: Holding the worn, cloth-covered book in his powerful hand, Dad's eyes would fill with the fire of conviction and he would say: “I would do it all again—even knowing beforehand what I would have to endure—just to have this book.”
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Many years later, while I was serving a full-time mission for the Church half a world away, I wrote Dad and asked him to share his testimony of the Book of Mormon. He responded with a tape recording that was the first time he attempted a permanent record of his amazing story.
Another batch of years went by. I was married and working as a freelance writer, and decided to embark on the telling of his story. It had been 36 years since war's end, and Dad was willing to participate in a recorded interview. From there, the floodgates opened and what began as a modest writing project turned into 28 years of research and a torrent of revisions.
My Father's Captivity tells not only the story of the battle-front and prison camp, but presents scores of original documents, such as letters, cards, and telegrams, that tell the story of the home-front war in the poignant words of the family who endured it. The unique Internet collection (http://alyoung.com/My_Fathers_Captivity/) also contains numerous letters from shortwave radio listeners who intercepted POW broadcasts and relayed the messages to anxious parents and family members.
Of course, the retelling of the story and the refining of various drafts meant that Dad relived it. He didn’t simply tell me about the Tottori Maru, he once again climbed down into the fouled holds of the cargo ship and sailed, unescorted, across vast stretches of open sea, waiting at any moment for the wailing of alarm to signal the approach of torpedoes from an Allied sub. Surprisingly few people know the unbelievable story of the hellships by which prisoners of the Japanese were transported to labor camps. A total of 21,000 POWs died aboard such ships. Because the vessels were unmarked, 19,000 of those deaths resulted directly from Allied fire, and of the total number of deaths, another 1,500 resulted from intolerable treatment. Overall, more than four out of every ten prisoners perished aboard ship. (See Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War by Gregory Michno (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001.)
In answering my questions, Dad lived again through cheerless days of slave labor and unmerited brutality in which his youth and strength and health were spent. I shall never forget one interview in particular, in which he talked about the night the incessant bombing of Tokyo literally blew away the camp. Nearly 50 years had passed since the holocaust, and yet I watched Dad as he described the bomb shelter where he sat in darkness, knee to knee with fellow prisoners, and told how blast after blast lifted the shelter's roof and set it down again until a numbing concussion sent ground water up around his ankles. Dad couldn't stop the chills from running up and down his arms while he talked, and it was all he could do to keep his voice from breaking.
Clark Field in the aftermath of the December 8th attack. The lower right aerial photograph was taken during an Allied bombing mission over the Yokohama industrial area May 29, 1945. The 374 photographs presented at alyoung.com include 32 images from the Allied bombing of Japan and the subsequent airlift of supplies into the devastated region.
Dad’s World War II experiences amounted to 1,362 days in a combat zone, of which 1,209 were spent as a prisoner of war. When Dad declares, as he is still wont to do, that he would endure it all again just to have the Book of Mormon, his declaration is neither idle nor merely poetic. It is, in fact what he has done since he came back from the war. For in all that time he has fought another, inner war just to be true to the truth he found when all but breath was taken from him. And in sharing his story for the sake of that beloved book, he has endured it all again.
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My Father’s Captivity is available at alyoung.com. The book's 320 pages feature a captivating narrative, 140 illustrations, and the text of 60 original documents that tell the story in the words of those who lived it on the home front as well as the battlefront. The volume's notes, bibliography, and index summarize more than 30 years of research and writing.
The director of the Center For Research Allied POWs Under The Japanese said the following after reading the book: “…this book is destined to become the classic POW story. If you want one of the five best books ever written about the POWs, this has to top your list. Beautifully written emotional, factual and the author clearly places you into the mind of a prisoner. If you want to buy just one book to understand the story of the POWs, buy this one book.”
Not available in bookstores.
