Interred as unknowns, POWs to get memorial

HONOLULU—U.S. 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 honoring about 400 Allied prisoners killed when a Japanese ship similar to a vessel he was once on was sunk by U.S. forces unaware the POWs were on board.

The men are buried 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.

On Wednesday, Crowley will help dedicate a memorial stone for the prisoners at the cemetery in Honolulu.

“These are men from the United States Armed Forces who were ignominiously thrown in a pit without marking by the country, our country,” Crowley said. “It was a sad thing that they were never recognized before they were buried together in a mixedup grave with no marker.”

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 Jan. 9, 1945. The Enoura Maru, which was en route from the Philippines to Japan, 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 initially buried in a mass grave near the harbor. The U.S. military retrieved the remains in 1946 and sent them to Hawaii for burial.

The group includes not just Americans but also Australians, Canadians, British, Norwegians and citizens of what is now the Czech Republic.