A BELATED APOLOGY
Lester Tenney, then 21 years old and married for only two months, landed in the Philippines in late November 1941.
He had joined the National Guard in 1940. "I knew that the United States was going to have a draft, so I voluntarily entered the service," he recalled.
What he did not know was that within a month of his arrival in Asia, Japan would attack Pearl Harbor and the Philippines.
Japan defeated the United States on the Bataan Peninsula in April 1942, and 78,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered.
Following the largest ever U.S. overseas surrender, Japan forced the POWs to walk more than 100 kilometers to their camp, offering little or no food and water. Thousands died during the what became known as the Bataan Death March.
Tenney survived, strengthened, he said, by his love and affection for his young wife, a spiritual pillar for him. He spent the later years of the war as slave in a Japanese coal mine.
When Japan announced its surrender, the Japanese camp commander gathered the POWs at Omuta, less than 40 miles from Nagasaki, where the United States had dropped an atomic bomb six days prior, and announced that "Japan and the United States are now friends," Tenney told Xinhua last August.
"Then all the Japanese soldiers simply left the camp," he said.
"Out of around 12,000 American POWs there, only 1,500 survived to the end," said Tenney. He himself was so weak by then that he remained in hospital for a year.
All this time his wife had been in limbo. While news of Bataan reached his wife, there was no confirmation of Tenney's fate. His wife waited for three years for news, even though she was told that Tenney was "presumed dead."
After the end of WWII, Tenney found that his wife had remarried just months earlier. Over 70 years later, he recalls the revelation as "a tremendously traumatic experience," but even so, he got back on his feet.
"It was easy for a veteran to get a job, but I wanted to get education. I hadn't had a chance to because of the war," he said. "I wanted to be a better member of society."
Tenney eventually received a PhD from the University of Southern California and became a professor.
In his later years, he was an active campaigner in the struggle to gain both an admission of responsibility and apology from Japan. It was thanks in part to his efforts, that in 2009, the Japanese ambassador to the United States Ichiro Fujisaki delivered a "heartfelt apology" for "having caused tremendous damage and suffering" to the Bataan victims.
Tenney joined other victims in a class action against several Japanese mining companies for reparations. "They were afraid that if they apologized, we would sue them," said Tenney.
Lester Tenney passed away in February aged 96.
END OF NIGHTMARE
Jay Vinyard, who served in the U.S. Air Force between 1942 and 1946, was in St. Joseph, Missouri with his wife on Aug. 15, 1945.
"We heard the news on the radio in our hotel room. We watched from our second floor hotel room window as the crowds gathered below on the downtown streets to celebrate," he recalled. "It was quite a sight -- a once-in-a-lifetime event.
"Aug. 15, 1945 will always be remembered by me as the day when victory finally arrived after so many terrible years of devastating conflict... It also proved that when two great powers such as China and the United States agree on a goal and work together to accomplish it, they will always be victorious in the end," said Vinyard.
In 1944, he was assigned to fly "the Hump," a vital airlift route over the Himalayas and the primary way the Allies supplied China between 1942 and 1945. Prior to the 2015 V-Day parade in Beijing, China awarded Vinyard a medal for his services.
"Like all members of our armed forces, I felt that day finally brought an end to a great nightmare and that we would now be able to get on with the rest of our lives," he added.
