Physician Saved POWs

Your letters “Don’t Forget Bataan” (April 10) were especially touching because Dr. Rocco L. Motto’s letter gave notice that Dr. Dan Golenternek had recently died. Golenternek and John Lamy were the two doctors at the American prisoners-of-war slave labor camp working at the Mitsubishi copper mine in Hanawa, Japan.

In August 1944, 1,035 American POWs -- survivors of Bataan and Corregidor -- were crowded into the forward hold of the “hell ship” Noto Maru in Manila and taken to Japan. On arrival, 500 of the POWs went directly to Hanawa and were required, under the threat of death, to dig out copper ore from the 1,300-year-old depleted mine. The labor contract between the Japanese army and Mitsubishi Co. officials required the army to furnish a given quota of workers for 12 hours of work, six days per week. The work conditions, living conditions and health of the POWs continued to deteriorate. Starvation, sickness and mine-related accidents took a heavy toll.

Dr. Golenternek was not given any medicines or medical facilities in his required job of keeping the slave-laborers -- the American POWs -- fit enough to walk the two miles to and from the mine daily, in their inadequate clothing and shoes, and to perform their 12-hour shifts.

Dr. Golenternek did not give a hoot about operations of the copper mine. His 100% effort was to keep the POWs alive. By hook and by crook, by sheer innovation and, yes, miracles, he managed to keep the sickest POWs from going to the mine. He created medical facilities and methods to treat wounds where there were none. He even convinced the Japanese to increase our food rations. All his methods had curative effects, and during that year of 1944-45, only eight POWs were lost.

And all the while, Dr. Golenternek treated all of us with kindness, with compassion, with dignity, and offered us hope at a time when there was no hope.

Most of us could not have survived another winter. And the Japanese were instructed to massacre all American POWs the moment U.S. forces landed on the Japanese homeland.

The bold decision of President Truman to drop atomic bombs on Japan prior to the homeland invasion forced the Japanese into early surrender. This unconditional surrender saved millions of Allied forces and Japanese. It also saved thousands of American, British, Dutch, Australian and other Allied POWs being held by Japan.

James T. Murphy

Santa Maria