POWs Gather to Dedicate Museum at Andersonville

Ray P. Perez and James Downey Jr. were Army buddies who shared unspeakable hardships as prisoners of the Japanese in World War II. Still friends half a century later, they came here to the site of an infamous Civil War prison to take part in the dedication Thursday of a museum erected to honor American prisoners of all wars.

For Perez and Downey, the dedication held special significance. Fifty-six years ago Thursday in the Philippines--shortly before noon, they remember with clarity--they were captured by the Japanese army and forced to participate in one of the best-documented atrocities of that war, the Bataan Death March. Those among the 37,000 captured U.S. and Filipino soldiers who survived the 65-mile trek along Luzon island’s Bataan peninsula, Downey said, “got two nights’ rest and one sweet potato.”

Perez, 76, of Staten Island, N.Y., and Downey, 83, of Newport News, Va., were among 5,000 people--many old and frail, leaning on canes or supported by relatives--who came from across the country for the dedication ceremony. The moment constituted what may be the last mass “gathering of eagles,” as Andersonville National Historic Site Supt. Fred Boyles called it, because the number of surviving POWs is dwindling.

The ceremony’s main speaker, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), himself a POW in Vietnam for more than five years, urged his fellow survivors to “take from this place all that is good about men, and leave hate and brutality behind in the ruins, with the fallen timbers, rusting wire and broken concrete of prisons that could not cage the souls of the captors, and not the captive.”

More than 800,000 Americans have been prisoners of war from the Revolutionary to the Persian Gulf War, including 45,000 Union soldiers incarcerated here during the Civil War, of whom 13,000 died of disease and malnutrition.

Of Americans taken prisoner in this century, 4,120 served in World War I; 130,201 in World War II; 7,140 in Korea; 772 in Vietnam; 23 in the Persian Gulf and one in Somalia, according to U.S. statistics.