Honor for 400 killed Allied prisoners during WWII

US Army Air Corps veteran Daniel Crowley endured more than three years of slave labor while being held prisoner by Japan during World War II.

This week, the 96-year-old is in Hawaii to participate in a dedication that honors about 400 Allied prisoners killed when a Japanese ship transporting them to Japan from the Philippines was sunk by US forces unaware they were on board. The men are in 20 separate graves marked as “unknowns” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which is located inside an extinct volcanic crater also known as Punchbowl.

Yesterday, Crowley was set to help dedicate a memorial stone for the prisoners at the cemetery in Honolulu.

The men were on board the Japanese freighter Enoura Maru in what is now Kaohsiung, Taiwan, when planes from the USS Hornet aircraft carrier bombed it on January 9, 1945. The Enoura Maru hadn’t been marked as having POWs on board so the pilots didn’t know they were attacking some of their own. The 400 were not just Americans but also Australians, Canadians, British, Norwegians and citizens of what is now the Czech Republic.

Crowley, who lives in Simsbury, Connecticut, is familiar with some of their ordeal.

The Army shipped him

to

the Philippines in 1941 after he enlisted as an 18-year-old in Greenwich. Japan attacked in December.

By April, his commanders surrendered thousands of US forces at Bataan. Crowley escaped to Corregidor Island, where he fought alongside US Marines for another month. This time, he was taken into Japanese custody.

Eighteen months of brutal labor building an air strip on the Philippine island of Palawan followed.

“If you didn’t move it, you were beaten immediately,” he said.

Each prisoner would get about 600 calories worth of food a day — just enough to keep them alive, he said.

Crowley’s ship took 17 days to reach Japan from the Philippines after taking a circuitous route to avoid U.S. planes.

The conditions on the ships transporting prisoners to Japan were so horrific the Americans called them “hellships.”

Crowley recalls being held below deck in such cramped conditions he could only squat — not lie down or stand. The prisoners had to defecate and urinate where they were, leaving their waste to cascade down to platforms below where more prisoners were held.

Their captors lowered rice to them once a day in a bucket that had earlier held excrement.