SEQUIM — Robert B. Heer’s entire family joined the fight to defeat the Japanese and end World War II after learning their son and brother was a Japanese prisoner of war somewhere in the Pacific theater.
After Heer, known as Bob — who in 1942 was stationed at Clark Field, about 60 miles northwest of Manila in the Philippines — had been listed as missing in action for more than a year, his mother, Bessie, joined the Women’s Army Corps.
His father, Earl Heer, joined the Army Air Corps.
One of his sisters, Evelyn, also joined the WAC, becoming a radio operator with the Army Air forces.
His youngest brother, James, joined the Navy at 17.
Only his sister Charlotte Slaughter was ineligible to join the service, having a 2-year-old baby at the time.
“My mother and father were really concerned about me,” the chipper 90-year-old recently recalled.
Heer lives in a south Sequim manufactured home park with his wife of 23 years, Karen, who has helped him keep close written records of his POW ordeal.
He still harbors vivid, nightmarish memories of his capture and imprisonment after seeing his Army buddies die in action or as captives.
Herr was captured in mid-September 1942 at Mindanao in the Philippine islands when he was a 21-year-old Army private with the 19th Bombardment Group and 30th Bomb Squadron.
He is the oldest living Japanese POW of World War II in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley.
Captured in 1942, Heer and his fellow POWs experienced the joy of liberation when Japan’s reign of terror came to a bloody, catastrophic end 31⁄2 years later.
For Heer and all of his colleagues, it was a long, sometimes painful, wait.
“At first, they were very caustic with us,” Heer said of his captors.
“We just had to learn how to keep away from them.”
Like many of his imprisoned comrades, Heer was beaten, leaving him with serious back injuries.
But it wasn’t until 2002 that U.S. Sen. Patty Murray decorated him with the Purple Heart.
That came after Congress passed legislation as part of the 1996 National Defense Authorization Act recognizing soldiers injured or wounded in captivity.
Prior to the 1996 legislation, none of the 140,000 U.S. service members who surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942 could qualify for the Purple Heart.
Not long after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they heavily bombed Clark Field, destroying most of his unit’s planes on the ground.
Heer, along with 650 men in the 19th Bombardment Squadron, on Dec. 29, 1941, left the port of Mariveles in southern Bataan aboard a small Philippine interisland steamer, the SS Mayon, sailing to Bugo, a port on Mindanao’s northwest coast.
Arriving there Jan. 1, 1942, after a bombing en route by a long four-engine Japanese seaplane, his squadron was assigned to the Del Monte air base to assist in servicing the remaining planes and other duties.
On May 3, 1942, Japanese forces landed at Cagayan on Mindanao about 15 miles from Del Monte.
Filipino troops and 65 men with Heer’s detachment attempted to fight off the invading Japanese troops but were unsuccessful.
Mindanao was surrendered to the Japanese on May 10, 1942, and Heer and other survivors were ordered to assemble at Camp Cassisang, a former Philippine army training facility at the barrio of Malaybalay in the sprawling Del Monte pineapple plantation.
While at Malaybalay, Heer volunteered to serve as an orderly to Brig. Gen. Joseph P. Vachon, the former chief officer of the Philippine army’s 101st Division in Mindanao.
Heer said he and other American and Filipino soldiers had two choices: either run and hide in the inhospitable jungle or surrender to the Japanese.
Having only shoes with holes in them and no food, Heer said he and others chose to surrender.
Two Filipino soldiers who tried to escape were captured.
Heer sadly remembers watching the two dig holes for the poles that Japanese soldiers then tied them to.
“I watched them be executed,” Heer said.
“It wasn’t very pleasant to watch. Everyone was so damn quiet.”
From then on, Heer said, he chose to be very careful in his relationship with his captors.
Required to bow to their captors or be punished, he said he and his fellow prisoners “bowed to the bushes” when they walked to the outdoor latrines to ensure that they would not give a guard reason to beat them.
One guard threatened him with a bayonet after he told the guard Japanese Emperor Hideki Tojo was “no damn good,” responding to the guard saying U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was “no damn good.”
Heer remembers Vachon giving him some advice: “‘Don’t eat anything you can’t peel.’ But after awhile, you got hungry and began to eat anything.”
Prisoners were fed small rations of leafy greens and rice with worms that had infested bags of rice and were cooked in with the meal.
“We pulled them out, but after awhile, we said, ‘The hell with it,’” he remembered, acknowledging that worms contained protein.
On Sept. 21, 1942, Heer and a group of about 500 POWs left Manila aboard a Japanese freighter, arriving at Karenko POW camp in Taiwan, China, a week later.
Heer remained on Karenko while Vachon was relocated to a camp in Taiwan.
He stayed there until he was shipped to a camp in southern Taiwan, where he was held with 26 Americans, 243 Britons and 90 other allied POWs.
Most worked at sugar cane plantations or in the sugar mill while others farmed and raised livestock or fowl, mostly for the Japanese troops in the area.
“They wanted us to get away from the Philippines,” he said, with the intent of spreading out POWs to weaken any chance of them building forces again.
He remained at the camp in Heito, Taiwain, until later in the summer of 1944, when he and 12 other POWs were moved north by train to another Taiwan POW agriculture camp on the Keelung River near what is today Taipae.
In early 1945, Heer and other POWs were shipped on a freighter to Japan, where they were transported by train to Aomori, Japan, the northernmost major port on Honshu Island.
From there, they were shipped to Hakodate, where other camps were located on the south end of Hokkaido.
In May 1945, Heer was moved 135 miles north to the Sorachi-gun district of Hokkaido Island, disembarking at the town of Akabira, where he and other allied POWS worked in an unsafe and minimally productive coal mine.
Although the Japanese surrendered Aug. 15, 1945, Herr and others were not told of the surrender until early September 1945, when American Army records clerks arrived and told them the war was over.
After liberation, Heer remembers eating well and gaining 40 pounds in Japan, making friends with post-war civilians there.
“I was giving food to the Japanese,” he said, even eating dinner with one family who invited him in after he gave them matches and soap, which was in short supply.
He was flown home Oct. 9, 1945, landing first in San Francisco.
In 1950, he joined the Air Force reserve and became a photojournalist.
He was honorably discharged in January 1966 and took various jobs in the private sector until he retired in Modesto, Calif., where he met his wife, Karen, with whom he now lives in Sequim.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.