An honor guard presides over the burial of Frank Perry, a Lodi man who endured the terrors of the Bataan death march and slave labor in a Japanese coal mine in World War II.

Frank Perry emblematic of World War II’s vanishing heroes

By Brian Ross
News-Sentinel staff writer

They have come to pay tribute to a fallen warrior on a blustery, cloud-covered fall afternoon. His flag-draped casket rests in the shade of a small myrtlewood tree.

Frank Perry’s friends and family have gathered for their final farewell; many have gray hair, canes or walkers — along with the other trappings of life in the autumn of one’s years.

Many are themselves WWII veterans, and sport the emblem-festooned overseas cap of the VFW, laden with the emblems, medals and badges which bear testimony to their service and their sacrifices.

Frank Perry after his release from a Japanese prison camp.

A VFW honor guard fires a 21-gun salute to Perry with their venerable old M-1 Garand rifles; the same weapons of hardwood and steel used by G.I.s to smash the spine of the axis more than a half-century ago.

The ravages of time have succeeded in doing what combat, disease, starvation and brutal treatment at the hands of Perry’s Japanese captors could not.

Perry is emblematic of the vanishing generation of heroes which is once again perishing in waves. This time, the enemy isn’t fascism, but father time.

“In the past 10 years, we’ve done 270 of these ceremonies,” said VFW chaplain Harold Klein shortly before Perry’s funeral Wednesday.

“Guys are dying off now at an alarming rate,” he added. “Every year there are fewer and fewer of us.”

An estimated 1,000 are dying each day. The average age of WWII veterans is now 80. Of the 16 million who were in uniform during WWII, most are gone. Roughly six million remain.

The greatest generation, they have been called.

Vanishing heroes.

Perry was one of them. Friends and relatives say he had been a carefree, likable youth who dreamed of seeing the world. In 1935, at the age of 17, he cajoled his mother into signing the papers to allow him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. After training, Perry was stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines as a quartermaster. It was everything he had dreamed it would be. The exotic location was to his liking, and he also escaped the grinding poverty of the Great Depression; the young Perry was able to live in relative comfort in the Philippines — even on an enlisted man’s pay.

It was almost heaven on earth, until Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces invaded the Philippines on the heels of a sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet, anchored at Pearl Harbor.

It was then that Perry got his first taste of combat, as the youthful quartermaster was handed a Springfield rifle and told he was now in the infantry.

The beleaguered garrison made a fighting retreat to Bataan, where they held off a a large and determined Japanese invasion force for months, buying precious time for allied forces to regroup. Finally, after running out of ammunition, the American troops were forced to surrender to the Japanese, and the infamous Bataan death march began.

Troops were driven across Luzon in a forced march with no food and very little water. Those who fell out of formation due to illness or fatigue were shot or bayoneted and left for dead by their Japanese captors.

When the American and Filipino troops were herded behind barbed wire to await shipment to Japan as slave laborers, Perry fell ill with malaria. He was given five large quinine tablets and told by the doctor that it would either cure or kill him. He awakened in a building known among prisoners as the “dead shed,” where the terminally ill were sent to die.

Realizing where he was, Perry struggled to his feet and walked out of the dead shed, rejoining his living compatriots.

Perry was later stuffed in the hold of a transport ship along with hundreds of others who had been able to survive the brutal ordeal to that point. They were shipped to Japan to provide slave labor for the Emperor’s war effort.

En route to Japan, the unmarked Japanese vessels came under attack by allied aircraft, and a number were sunk — their cargoes of helpless POWs going to a watery grave.

In Japan, Perry found himself enslaved in a coal mine in northern Honshu, Japan’s main island. There, he and others were subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of guards — men whom even the Japanese army, left in tatters by battlefield attrition, regarded as unfit for regular duty.

The backbreaking work and almost nonexistent rations took their toll on Perry, who dropped to about 86 pounds from his normal weight of 140.

One day, for a minor infraction he was savagely beaten by a guard wielding a pick handle. Perry collapsed in a heap, unconscious. When he awakened he feigned insanity, and was assigned to work in the officer’s vegetable garden. The change probably saved his life; he was able to breathe clean air again, his workload was considerably lighter, and he was able to supplement his diet with vegetables purloined from the garden.

The end of Perry’s torment came with startling abruptness, as the twin nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945 humbled Japan’s once-ferocious war machine into unconditional surrender.

He was soon after repatriated.

Later Perry learned the fate of the guard who had beaten, maimed and killed dozens at the nightmarish Japanese coal mine: His life came to an end dangling from 11 feet of waxed manila hemp, and his cremation was carried out in the absence of mourners or ceremony of any type.

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