Children of two World War II POWs take heartfelt journey of discovery to Japan
Credit: By David Venditta, The Morning Call [PA]
Aug 15, 2020 

The Szczepanskis (from left) Catherine, Rick, Tom and Joe on Easter Sunday 1958 at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado. Joe, an aerial photographer, retired from the Air Force the next year as a technical sergeant, after 21 years of service. Another son, Michael, was born in 1964. (Contributed by Rick Szczepanski)
For much of their lives, Dawne Clay and Rick Szczepanski have been getting to know their troubled fathers.
Both men endured cold, hunger, disease and brutality as prisoners of the Japanese during World War II. Rick’s dad survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines and slave labor in Japan. Dawne’s father was captured on Corregidor, an island fortress off the Bataan peninsula, and spent three winters freezing in Manchuria, where he was subjected to a particular evil.
With Japan’s surrender 75 years ago, they came home to eastern Pennsylvania and, like millions of other veterans, got jobs and raised families. But inescapable terror led them to act in ways hurtful to themselves and others. 
What we now call post-traumatic stress was little understood, and treatment fell far short of what damaged souls needed.

Rick Szczepanski got caught up in his father’s life while writing his obituary. Dawne’s interest began while her dad, Wayne Miller, was still living. It compelled her to seek a medal for valor to which he was entitled, but didn’t receive until the year he died. 
Besides decades of research and meeting with ex-prisoners and their relatives through the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, Rick and Dawne went to Japan last year as guests of its government. They are among more than 130 ex-prisoners and their descendants who have participated in a belated bid for reconciliation and healing, the Japan POW Friendship Program.
“The Japanese are trying to make amends for the past,” said Rick, a retired owner of a mechanical contracting business who lives in East Allen Township.
He remembers being a boy trying to sleep, when his dad would come home late from a bar, sit by himself in the kitchen and rant in Japanese for an hour or more. Other times, his temper would flare at any moment. He drank too much, and though he wasn’t physical with his anger, he was combative and put considerable mental strain on his family. It drove the youngest of Joe Szczepanski’s three sons to alcoholism, Rick said, and an early death.
When Rick got older, he distanced himself from his father so he wouldn’t have to put up with his scrappiness.
Joe was a tough guy from coal country, an amateur boxer. He joined the National Guard even before graduating from Nanticoke High School in Luzerne County. With the regular Army in 1938, he served in a chemical warfare battalion in Hawaii, and then transferred to the Army Air Corps. He shipped out to the Philippines in 1940 and clerked at the Nichols Field air base outside Manila.
Army Air Corps veteran Joe Szczepanski is pictured with a canister of mustard gas, when he served as a chemical warfare systems battalion on Oahu, Hawaii, in 1938. (HANDOUT/Courtesy of Rick Szczepanski)

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese troops swept down the island of Luzon and trapped American and Filipino forces in Bataan. On April 9, 1942, they surrendered. Joe, a tech corporal who had been driving supplies to the front lines and bringing back the dead and wounded, was among those taken prisoner the next day and sent on the Bataan Death March. Thousands were run over, shot, bayoneted or beaten to death, beheaded or buried alive.
Joe ended up at Cabanatuan, where the Japanese forced him to do construction work 10 hours a day, with nothing but meager portions of gourd soup and rice to sustain him.
He saw five Americans executed for bribing a guard and leaving the camp to get food. “All of the boys were forced to dig their own graves and were shot down in the graves while they were singing ‘God Bless America,’” Joe said in war crimes testimony. 
Another time, three officers caught trying to escape were whipped, stoned and spat upon while forced to stand naked in the cold. “This lasted for about three days, following which the officers became delirious and were marched down the road and shot to death.”
In the summer of 1943, Joe was among 500 POWs picked to work for Japan’s war industry. They were packed aboard a “hell ship” to Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island, and taken by train to the town of Omuta, site of Fukuoka Camp 17 and a coal mine run by the Mitsui Mining Co.
Joe had to work in the mine. When a Japanese overseer complained he was lagging, the man and two guards beat Joe senseless, revived him with water and knocked him out again. Joe lost five teeth. “They gave me the alternative of being shot or accepting the beating,” he told a war crimes investigator.
To get out of toiling in the mine for a few months, he smashed his foot with a chunk of coal.
Outside his barracks on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, he saw smoke billowing some 30 miles away, across the Ariake Sea. It was the atomic bomb over Nagasaki. Japan surrendered six days later, but it wasn’t until weeks later that Joe walked out of the camp. Back in the U.S., he spent a year-and-a-half recuperating at Valley Forge General Hospital.
His days in the service weren’t over. In the new Air Force, he did aerial photography for the Strategic Air Command. He spent more than 21 years in the service, before retiring and going to college, where he prepped for a shorter career as a Spanish teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School.
When emphysema almost killed him in the mid-1980s, he pulled himself together. He quit smoking and drinking. “I’m not going to let the past run my life anymore,” he said, and he seemed at peace with himself. He died in 2005 at age 86.
Telling their stories
The need to know more about their fathers landed Rick and Dawne in the Bataan and Corregidor defenders group, made up of surviving POWs, their relatives and friends. 
It aims “to preserve and perpetuate the story of the men and women who defended the Philippines and other Allied outposts against overwhelming odds during the first months of World War II in the Pacific and later became prisoners-of-war.”
The group’s president, Jan Thompson, said it has about 500 members worldwide, about two dozen of them ex-POWs. It provides financial support to the National American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Museum, Education and Research Center in Wellsburg, West Virginia, and it holds annual conventions, though not this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
At the 2009 convention in San Antonio, Texas, the Japanese ambassador to the United States apologized to the POWs. A formal apology came the next year, on Japanese soil, from the country’s foreign minister. It was made to six U.S. veterans in the first group invited under the POW Friendship Program.
Japan has much to atone for. According to the Congressional Research Service, of the 27,465 U.S. military personnel captured and interned by the Japanese, 11,107 died — more than 40%. By contrast, the death rate of Americans in German POW camps was a little over 1%.
The Allies exacted a measure of justice after the war, thanks in part to testimony from Joe Szczepanski and other survivors. Some 5,000 Japanese were convicted of war crimes, and more than 900 of them were put to death, including the commandant of Fukuoka Camp 17, where many prisoners died from abuse.

Wayne Miller could have told of atrocities, but he didn’t testify. His daughter doesn’t know why.
He grew up in Fleetwood and quit Kutztown High School to work on his parents’ farm. In February, he joined the Army Air Corps and learned how to use radar. By August, he was in Manila with the Aircraft Warning Service. 
Japanese troops invaded the Philippines the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, while he was at Neilson Field near Manila. His air warning unit retreated to Bataan and moved on to Corregidor.
When the island’s troops surrendered in May 1942, he began a long and misery-laden journey on foot, by train and hell ship that ultimately led to Mukden, Manchuria. Japanese factories were clustered near the camp. Wayne worked in a steel mill and learned Japanese so handily that he became a courier.
Beriberi, dysentery and other ailments sidelined him for months in the camp hospital. Liberation came on Aug. 16, 1945, the day after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. A team from the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, parachuted into the camp just ahead of Soviet troops.
Wayne married and settled in Reading, got a job as a machinist at knitting-machine maker Textile Machine Works and joined the Army Reserve. When the Korean War broke out, he wanted to return to active duty but couldn’t because of his POW medical record. That rejection enraged him.
Even as a child, Dawne knew that something haunted her father. Her mother worked nights and told her, “No matter what you hear your father doing in his bedroom, don’t go in there.” But when Dawne heard him screaming, she rushed in to wake him.
“Fortunately, my mother came home at the same time, because I was blue. He was strangling me, not knowing it was me.”
She once climbed up on his lap and put her arms around him, but he froze, his arms stiffened at his sides and he told her to get down.
They moved to Mertztown when Dawne, the couple’s only child, was 10. For several years in the mid-1950s, Wayne attended reunions of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, but stopped because of terrible nightmares. When Dawne was in her late 20s, he opened up to her about things that happened to him.
Unexpected kindnesses
At Mukden, the Japanese ordered him to carry 50-pound bags of sugar, but he was weak and weighed little more than 72 pounds. They tied boards onto the back of his legs to keep his knees from buckling, and laughed about it. They beat him unconscious with rifle butts and threw him onto a pile of dead men awaiting burial. A barracks mate nicknamed Snuffy got two other POWs to help him pull Wayne off the pile. They hid him, found a bag of rotten potatoes and made a soup for him.
In an episode of unimaginable horror, the Japanese forced a buddy of Wayne’s to kneel in front of him and chopped off his friend’s head. Wayne had to stand and hold the dripping head for 48 hours, the face turned toward him. If Wayne tottered, a guard jabbed him with a bayonet.
Not all of the guards were barbaric. One came to Wayne’s aid when two others cornered him in a doorway and demanded his grandmother’s wedding band, which she had given him to wear. They cut his arm each time he said no, the slices going from his wrist almost to his shoulder. When they were about to cut off Wayne’s hand to get the ring, Yoshio Kai appeared.
Yoshio was born in San Francisco and moved with his family to Tokyo in the 1920s. An interpreter, he showed some kindness toward the prisoners. He yelled at the two guards and they left.
“You take that ring off,” he told Wayne in perfect English. “I don’t ever want to see it again. I saved your life today. I can’t do this because it will be my life.”
Wayne put the ring around a tooth and kept it in his mouth for the rest of his time at Mukden. When freed, he put it back on his finger. About a year before he died, Dawne said, he lost it while raking leaves in his backyard.
Unwittingly, Wayne returned Yoshio’s kindness. In the disorder right after Japan’s surrender, Yoshio invited Wayne and another freed POW to his house for dinner. Yoshio and his wife, Hatsuko, lent the two men their bicycles to ride back to camp. When Wayne returned his bike the next morning, Yoshio wasn’t home. Two Red Army soldiers were in the house. They had stripped Hatsuko and were about to rape her. Wayne opened the door, and she cried out, “American soldier!” The Soviets ran off.
The Kais gave him a white linen handkerchief signed, “To Wayne Miller, thank you.”
Ultimately, Wayne wanted to return to reunions of the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. In 1994, Dawne and her husband went with him and his wife to the Florida convention. After that, his wife balked at going again. Wayne didn’t attend another reunion until 10 years later, when Dawne and Terry started taking him.
In 2007, the couple took him on a trip with other ex-POWs to the former Mukden camp, now a museum in Shenyang, China. They brought along the Kais’ hanky, planning to donate it as evidence that some Japanese cared about American prisoners. They were on a bus without Wayne, telling others about him and the Kais. A young woman in front of them turned around in tears and said, “I’m their daughter.” Her father had died in 2004. Dawne and Terry gave her the hanky to return to her mother.
At the camp, Wayne entered his old barracks and immediately went upstairs to where his wooden bunk was and lay down on it. He curled into a fetal position and cried.
“We had to coax him to get up,” Dawne said. “And then he started talking to the other men who were prisoners of that camp. They got serious and said, ‘Do you remember this?’ And somebody would say, ‘Yeah,’ and somebody else would say, ‘I remember it, too.’ It was such an affirmation for them.”
That night, her dad lay in bed and said, “Now I know it’s all true. These things did happen. I didn’t make them up.”
Dawne was looking after another ex-POW on the trip, Bob Brown. One day he invited her into his room and said, “There’s a folder on my bed. I think you should look at it.”
Brown had been an orderly at the Mukden camp hospital and kept records on patients. He still had them. A code on Wayne’s card indicated he’d been subjected to medical experiments overseen by a shadowy detachment of the Japanese army known as Unit 731. Its doctors conducted ghastly tests on people in Manchuria as part of a germ warfare program.
Dawne asked Bob if he’d talk to her dad about it. “I’m not going there,” he said.
Her concern deepened when she asked her dad about his time in the hospital. He remembered being there for some illnesses, but couldn’t account for other months he was laid up. In his mind, all of that time was lost.
Wayne’s behavior could be odd or even inappropriate. He’d jump up, roll up his sleeve and take off his shirt. He told Dawne he was looking for lice. He could be crude, offensive and hurtful. Though he was better when he took the medications he got from Veterans Affairs, they made him foggy and lethargic.
One day while looking through her dad’s Army papers, Dawne found a 1946 document stating he had been in line to get a Silver Star for gallantry, “but he was captured soon afterward and the awarding did not come through.” For six years, Dawne pressed the military to follow up with the medal.
Wayne got it, along with a Bronze Star for heroism, just months before he died at age 89. The Silver Star citation says that on April 30, 1942, while the Japanese were shelling and bombing Corregidor, he operated a field generator that supplied power to a radar antenna tracking enemy aircraft. “Alone and without adequate cover, Private Miller remained at his post though he was ordered to leave.”
Shortly before his death in 2010, Dawne was with him in a doctor’s office when he started screaming, “Get down, get down! Don’t you see them up there along the ridge? It’s the Japanese!”
“From that point on,” she said, “he was totally back in the war.”
One day Dawne was called into a conference with two doctors at an Allentown nursing home where Wayne was a resident. They couldn’t identify a strain of bacteria attacking his immune system. Antibiotics only subdued it for a week or so. The doctors asked about his whereabouts during the war.
“And so I put two and two together,” Dawne said.
It was clear to her that sadistic doctors in the Japanese Imperial Army had used her father as a guinea pig. Survivors’ accounts show that Mukden POWs were given injections some suspected weren’t vaccines, as the Japanese had told them.
At their home in Mohrsville, Berks County, Dawne and Terry have built a shrine of photos, plaques and flags to honor her father. Across the top, it says “Home of the free because of the brave.” They’ve kept Wayne’s papers and memorabilia, and collected dozens of books and videos on the POW experience. Among them is historian Linda Goetz Holmes’ 2010 book “Guests of the Emperor,” which offers proof that the Japanese commander in Manchuria ordered Unit 731 to Mukden.
“As much as I’m invested in this,” said Dawne, who recently retired from Boscov’s, “Terry is really gung-ho.” In 2013, he organized a reunion of Mukden survivors who spoke at Hamburg Area High School and on local radio.
Through the defenders group, Dawne and Rick signed up for the POW Friendship Program, sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the U.S. State Department helping to make arrangements. Japan’s guests meet with government officials, researchers and citizen groups, and see war memorials. Many can go to former prison and labor camps.
Another trip is on for October. So far, 64 former POWs and about 70 descendants have participated. Sadly, Joe Szczepanski and Wayne Miller died without having the opportunity.
The camp is gone 
Last September, Rick Szczepanski and Dawne Clay arrived in Tokyo with six others from the defenders group. Japan covered all expenses for the weeklong stay —travel, hotels, meals, guides ― totaling about $20,000 per person, Rick said.
They met with Japan’s parliamentary vice-minister of foreign affairs, who told Rick, “This is what we have of your father’s,” and handed him a copy of Joe Szczepanski’s POW index card, which even has his parents’ names and home address. Rick was surprised the card existed, and was elated to have it. Dawne got one, too, but was disappointed. It has little more than “MU,” for Mukden.
On Kyushu, near Omuta, Rick stood where barracks once housed his dad and 1,800 other Allied prisoners. Nothing remains of Fukuoka Camp 17. He saw only a massive black mound in the distance, part of a coal storage site. He wanted to know about the Mitsui coal mine, where his dad did exhaustive, dangerous work under abusive civilians.
“Where is the mine?” Rick asked, and he was surprised at how close to the camp it was — less than a mile. He went there with his guide, a researcher, two other Japanese and a friend whose father was among hundreds of POWs rescued from Cabanatuan in the Great Raid, celebrated in the 2005 film of the same name. The mine is closed, but the entrance, buildings and some equipment are still there.
“I had studied so much on it, but the mine had an impact on me,” Rick said. “It filled in missing pieces.”
What struck him most was seeing the vehicle that took the POW laborers down into the mine, how crude it was. He imagined his dad riding in it, disappearing into the depths.
On the main island of Honshu, Dawne visited the Kyoto Museum of World Peace and heard a talk by a Japanese history professor. The woman said something that left Dawne livid. Even after she came home, she was so angry that she didn’t want to talk about it. It was about the Unit 731 doctors.
“Those bastards got off scot-free,” Dawne said. “She showed me a picture of them. It really took me over the edge.”
After the war, the United States made a secret deal with the Unit 731 doctors and their leader, granting them immunity in exchange for the results of their research.
“It infuriated me that our government would hide this,” Dawne said. “Why didn’t they make the families aware of it?”
As disturbing as that revelation was, her journey to her father’s past has given her some peace.
“It has helped me to understand why he was the way he was,” she said.
Rick’s study of his dad’s ordeal has given him an encyclopedic grasp of the details. Asked what Joe suffered from, he responded in seconds: dry beriberi, dysentery, malaria, parasites in his blood, a hernia, a broken nose, a busted jaw with loss of teeth, a broken instep from purposely smashing his foot, and later, neurosis stemming from beriberi and lung cancer linked to a spot found on his lung when he was repatriated.
Rick has also found satisfaction in sharing information with relatives of POWs who crossed paths with his dad.
“So many died in World War II, and a lot of families never had an answer to what happened,” he said. “It makes me feel so great that I’m able to help others.”

But as with Dawne, his greatest reward has been a better understanding of his father. Summing it up, he said: “I love you, Dad. I just never knew you.”

Photo: Dawne Clay with her dad, ex-POW Wayne Miller, in 2007 when they visited the old Mukden POW camp, now a museum in Shenyang, China. 
(Contributed by Dawne Clay)