Brothers reminisce about WWII service

Delbert (left) and Crawford Harlan reminisced about their service in World War II. Crawford was a prisoner of the Japanese for 39 months. (Democrat photo/Mark Randall)

Crawford joined the Army almost a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor and surrendered in the Philippines when Corregidor fell in May 1942. He would spend the next 39 ½ months as a prisoner of war in Manchuria.

Delbert enlisted in February 1942 just after Pearl Harbor was bombed, but remained stateside as a medic and flight surgeon assistant at air bases in Texas.

Crawford quit high school and worked at Poinsett Lumber and Manufacturing Co., but decided he wanted to see the world and joined up in January 1941.

He was shipped to the Philippines where he operated a search light in the 60th Coast Guard Artillery.

It was a cushy job and he remembered how pretty the moonlit nights were in the tropics. But when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor it wasn't long before the war came to the Philippines.

General Douglas MacArthur had about 25,000 regular Army troops on the islands at the time and ten divisions of support troops.

Crawford was stationed on Corregidor Island which guarded the entrance to Manila Bay.

A Japanese air attack the day after Pearl Harbor severely crippled American forces and forced MacArthur to withdraw his forces to the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor.

Unable to hold against the invading Japanese, MacArthur was ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt to evacuate to Australia and left behind a small force to hold out against the Japanese for as long as they could.

Crawford's unit was ordered to set up positions on Bataan in December.

"When the war broke out, we found out Japan had a convoy on the way and moved over to Bataan," Crawford said.

He remembers eating his last full meal on Christmas Day. Rations were cut in half after that.

"I lost about 40 pounds," Crawford said. "We didn't have anything to eat. We were pretty hungry."

When the situation on Bataan became hopeless, Crawford was evacuated back to Corregidor.

"They told us to destroy our weapons and meet down at the dock," Crawford said. "We were taken over to Corregidor."

The very next day, April 9, 1942, the starving and outnumbered garrison on Bataan surrendered to the Japanese. Thousands of American and Filipino troops would later be forced to begin what became known as the Bataan Death March to prison camps.

The Japanese then began an intensive bombing campaign to take Corregidor and pounded the island for the next month. The defenders were reduced to living on about thirty ounces of food a day and only received water twice a day.

"We kept hearing that help is on the way. Help is on the way," Crawford said. "We knew we weren't going to get any help."

Corregidor held out until 1:30 p.m. on May 6 when the order came to surrender.

The Corregidor garrison did not take part in the Bataan Death March, but about 4,000 American and Filipino defenders were paraded through the streets of Manila and imprisoned at Fort Santiago and Bilibid Prison. The rest were loaded on to boxcars and taken by train to various prison camps.

"There were about 100 men in each box car," Crawford said. "And they were about half the size of the ones in America. There was no room to sit. You had to stand up."

Crawford spent five months in two different prison camps in the Philippines before being shipped out to Korea and eventually to Manchuria.

"We had no idea where we were," Crawford said. "It was real cold though. We could see our breath."

The camp held 1,200 U.S. soldiers and a contingent of 300 men from Great Britain and Australia.

Over 200 Americans died that winter.

Younger brother joins the war

Delbert knew his brother Crawford was in the Philippines, but had no idea he was a prisoner of war when he enlisted in February 1942.

He had been working in a grocery store in Trumann when the war broke out.

"I felt like it was my duty to enlist," Delbert said.

He was shipped out to Camp Barkley in Abilene, Texas and later went to the Army air base in Lubbock where he worked as a medic at the base hospital and at Frederick Army Field in Oklahoma where he became a flight surgeon assistant.

"The flight surgeon was in charge of the health of the pilot trainees," Delbert said.

Two other brothers, Wade and Doak also joined the war effort. Wade served in the Marines in the Aleutian Islands in the famous Seabees and on Okinawa. Doak joined the Navy and was stationed in San Francisco. A sister, Glenna, was an Army nurse in Europe.

Delbert said he wrote to his mother every week and learned the news about Crawford.

"I think it was about four or five months later when she wrote me about him," Delbert said.

Life as a POW

Life as a prisoner of war of the Japanese was hard. Crawford was forced to work 11 hours a day at a former Ford plant.

Crawford said there were about 400 of them who worked at the factory. One of the Japanese guards used to count them by writing his figures in the air while he added them up.

"We laughed about it," Crawford said. "But it's an actual fact. That Jap guard would figure it up in the air then erase it."

Workers were given color coded cars to denote what type of worker they were -- red was for excellent workers, blue for good workers and white cards for bad workers.

The Japanese were brutal captors, he said.

"You had to salute them or they would slap you around," Crawford said. "They were brutal to their own people, especially if you were a lower rank."

What little food they got was horrible. There was no rice. Prisoners subsisted on soup and cooked soybeans which were pressed into a bun.

"It made a lot of us sick," Crawford said. "We tried to get the doctor to get them to stop feeding us soybeans, but it turned out the soybeans actually saved us."

Despite the conditions, he never developed a hatred for the Japanese or despaired that he wouldn't make it out alive.

"They did some things they should have been killed for," Crawford said. "But I didn't hate them."

They did manage to get some bits of news about the war. A soldier from Atkins, Ark. who worked in the machine shop learned Chinese and shared what he learned with the other prisoners.

"We heard Roosevelt died," Crawford said. "And we knew that the Russians had declared war on Japan. We heard rumors that something (the atomic bomb) happened."

An Army intelligence man from G-2 and a Japanese man parachuted in to the camp a few days after the Japanese formally surrendered.

Crawford said they later learned that the Japanese had planned to execute them on Aug. 19.

The camp was liberated by the Russian Army on Aug. 20, 1945.

Crawford said a Russian officer gave a windy speech in which he extolled the efforts of the Russians in winning the war.

"Oh he was windy," Crawford said. "They were bragging on themselves. 'We freed your friends in Germany and I promised I would come here and free you.' They were the overbearingest people I ever met."

Reunited with family

Crawford was eventually moved to the China coast and transported to Okinawa then to Manila by B-24.

He stopped off to see Delbert at an air base in Houston before returning home to Trumann.

"He sent a telegram that he was coming," Delbert remembered. "You had to come through here to get discharged. When I got the telegram I had to borrow a car to come get him. I think he had just about had given up on me. But I met him on the street."

Crawford spent the night then finally made it back home to Trumann on Halloween 1945.

Life eventually got back to normal for Crawford. He got in to the seed and hardware business with brother Doak, but sold his interest in the store and took up farming. He retired in 1976.

Delbert re-enlisted in the Army and stayed in until 1946 before finally returning to Trumann where he eventually worked for the Post Office.

Doak continued to operate the hardware business until just before his death at age 82. Wade Harlan moved to Sedona where he became an accountant for the State of Arizona. Sister Glenna married a serviceman she met overseas during the war and lived in Chicago.