Old Soldiers Remember the Victory Over Japan

When Art Beale was released from a Japanese prisoner of war camp in August, 1945, he weighed less than 80 pounds and had a soul filled with wrenching memories.

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Nearly 100 of the 119 Navy officers he served with in the Philippines were dead. Some had starved, some were decapitated by the enemy, and others were doused with gasoline and set on fire when Allied troops advanced on the camps where they were held.

“When I sit and listen, I remember their faces and I get choked up,” Beale said Thursday at a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific, held at Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa.

Beale, 78, a retired naval officer from Westminster, was one of about 450 World War II veterans and their families who came here to pay tribute to those who served and died in the Pacific island campaigns.

The gathering allowed them to share memories they have a hard time telling others about.

“I worked for Ford Motor Co. for 30 years and no one knew I was a prisoner of war,” said Harold Hicks, 73, of Anaheim. Hicks survived the Bataan death march after the Philippines fell to the Japanese, but kept his years in prison camps a secret because, he said, no one would believe what he had witnessed.

Many, including Hicks and Beale, were upset that the event’s organizing committee chose to call the event “Victory in the Pacific” rather than “Victory over Japan,” which they see as a case of revisionism.

“It’s a distortion of history,” said Florence Leach, 73, a former Women’s Marine from Santa Ana.

“This political correctness is a cop-out,” said Cliff Hagenbuch, a merchant marine from San Clemente. “Why don’t they wait 25 years until we are dead, and then lie about it? The Japanese were not angels.”

But one of the organizers said the title was chosen because it is easier to understand than calling it a “V-J Day” event.

“A lot of people outside of the military don’t know what V-J stands for,” said Hal Camp, 77, chairman of the ceremony’s organizing committee.

Still, Camp said he was sympathetic with the audience’s concerns.

“There is a lot of bad feeling against Japan for the people who served in the Pacific,” Camp said. “We didn’t intend [the name] to be a placating gesture.”

Those with memories of the war expressed no regret over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When Ret. Marine Corps Col. Jay R. Vargas told the crowd he supported President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bombs, the audience burst into applause.

“It saved many, many Americans,” he said.

Between U.S. Marine Corp band’s patriotic melodies, commanding officers from all branches of the military read eulogies for Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz, who were the chief commanders in the Pacific, among others.

Robbert Shuller, 62, of Newport Beach went to the ceremony to show his appreciation for the military that liberated him during the war. At age 12, Shuller became a prisoner of war along with his family in what was then Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia.

“It is because of the Allied forces that I am here,” Shuller said.