Two Men, Still Haunted by War, Seek Justice

They came to Los Angeles in the middle of last week, Harold Poole and his old comrade in arms V.O. “Johnny” Johnson, a couple of elderly Mormon men, in town for a day from their homes in Utah.

Harold is 80 years old and a retired mail carrier in Salt Lake City.

Johnny lives south of there, in a city called Sandy. He is 79 and was employed by the Air Force in a civilian capacity until his retirement.

They were stationed together with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines one terrible day in December long ago, when Japanese warplanes appeared in the sky.

Bombers had already hit Hawaii. Now a second island was under attack. Thousands of scrambling Allied servicemen ran for cover.

Johnny Johnson was an aircraft mechanic. Harold Poole worked in munitions. In the months to come, they would be prisoners of war, brutalized and used for slave labor.

It was the first day of the rest of their lives.

Fifty-eight years later to that day, they came to L.A., still wishing they could forget it, but still waiting for somebody to make it right.

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Jim Parkinson, an attorney in Palm Desert, was just wrapping up work in a case involving the tobacco industry when a nearly 6-decade-old story of war atrocities first began to catch his eye.

A new state law in California had been enacted during the summer. It extended until 2010 the statute of limitations for Holocaust victims, POWs and similar casualties of war to seek legal action against those who caused their suffering.

The subject came up one day when Parkinson was speaking with Paul Warner, his friend from Brigham Young law school days and now U.S. attorney for Utah.

“Parky,” said Warner, abruptly grabbing his college friend’s arm, “you know my father-in-law was in the Bataan Death March.”

His father-in-law is Harold Poole.

After the last American and Filipino forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s rule were rounded up in early 1942, they were marched 60 miles by their Japanese captors through Luzon to the western province of Bataan. They were starved and tortured. Some who stumbled and fell were beheaded on the spot with samurai swords.

Poole and Johnny Johnson witnessed this. They were among the nearly 20,000 herded to Bataan, put aboard transport ships with neither medical treatment nor nourishment and taken to Japan. There they were not imprisoned but exploited by private Japanese industries under inhumane conditions.

Because his friend Warner’s family had been touched by this episode, Parkinson’s interest grew. It stirred memories of his own father’s heroism during the war, of long-suppressed emotions that surfaced even as they sat together watching the film “Saving Private Ryan.”

Therefore, when a window of opportunity appeared under California’s extension of the statute of limitations for World War II victims like Poole and Johnson, it was Parkinson’s firm of Herman, Middleton, Casey & Kitchens that took the case.

They purposely waited for Dec. 7, anniversary of the day of infamy. At a Los Angeles courthouse last week, after 58 years, Harold and Johnny sued the Japanese.

“In my life,” Parkinson says, “I’ve never been around people I’ve been more impressed with. I’ve tried a lot of cases, but these people have transformed me. I’m humbled just to speak with them.”

Specifically, the suit on Poole’s behalf is against Nippon Steel and its related entities. Johnson is suing the Ishihara Sangyo chemical corporation. Their quarrel is with private businesses, not Japan’s government.

No matter how much time passes, the two men still have nightmares about the experience. According to their lawyer, they still “kick the covers off the bed at night, thinking that they’re still there.”

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At the moment Japanese Zeros attacked, Harold Poole got his hands on a machine gun and aimed at the sky. It jammed. He field-stripped the weapon, with bombs dropping around him, cleaned it and fired again, shooting down a plane. For this he would later be awarded a Silver Star.

“Harold Poole is my hero,” Parkinson says. “Both of these men, if you went to Central Casting, you couldn’t find two better people, two more deserving people.

“What they need now is closure.”

In the Mormon faith, a young man is assigned by the church to a two-year mission somewhere in the world, to live and to learn. Harold Poole’s son was sent to Japan.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com