Living history
Death March re-enactment
A shot from the Death March Memorial Walk.
Adolf Hitler’s silverware and napkin from this house in Munich.
A view of the museum’s main room.
Take a 20-mile drive west along Pennsylvania state Route 844 and you’ll wind up in Wellsburg, W.Va. If you go as far as you can, you’ll reach the Ohio River and the Brooke County Public Library. Inside, you’ll find something that will transport you across the globe and back in time more than 70 years to the Pacific Theater of World War II.
The American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor Museum Education and Research Center opened here in 2002 and is the only national repository dedicated to this history. The museum houses donations of personal papers, photographs and artifacts from Americans who were prisoners of war of Imperial Japan during World War II.
After the April 9, 1942, United States surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops were forced to make a grisly 65-mile march without food or water, ending at prison camps. “This was the largest surrender of its kind in the history of any battle going back to Roman times,” said ADBC Museum curator and executive director James Brockman. “No army has every surrendered that many people. Sixty-six thousand people got surrendered in one day.”
More than 11,000 of the approximately 27,500 Americans imprisoned in Japan during the war perished during their captivity. Thousands died during the grueling march from malnutrition and torture, and thousands more perished while being transported in crammed ships to Japan. “The Japanese didn’t realize how many people they had to deal with,” Brockman said. “Sixty thousand people were involved with this process, plus the Philippines, Australians and civilians. They really didn’t have the facilities to control this.”
Once in Japan, most prisoners of war suffered from starvation and disease in labor camps where they were forced to work for private Japanese companies.
One of those POWs was Ed Jackfert of Wellsburg, who was captured in the Philippines in 1942 and imprisoned at a Showa Denko factory in Kawasaki, Japan, for more than three years until the war ended. In 2002, Jackfert donated his extensive collection of artifacts and documents from the conflict to create the museum. Two more POWs from the tri-state area, Joe Vater of McKees Rocks and Abi Abraham of Butler County, also donated their collections. Once word of the museum spread, donations poured in from across the country.
“We’re talking about expanding and trying to put out the whole collection,” Brockman says. “Some places put things out for 30 or 90 days and rotate. We try to put it out and keep it out as much as we can. We only rotate about once a year.”
That collection includes 1,600 diaries written by POWs while in captivity, photographs taken by Vater while he was a POW, as well as the camera he used to take them, more than 1 million pages of documents such as maps of the labor camps and a sword presented to Abraham by a Japanese soldier when he learned of his country’s surrender.
“We get wedding photos of people, medals, uniforms, oral histories on videotape,” Brockman added.
It’s grown to also include other WWII artifacts, including letters home from a GI stationed on Guadalcanal and a display of Adolph Hitler’s silverware, napkins, daggers and armbands found in his home in Munich.
Last year, a delegation from Mitsubishi Materials visited the ADBC museum after the company’s historic apology for its use of American POWs as forced labor during World War II. Mitsubishi donated $50,000 to support the museum and its educational programs. The museum works with a university in Japan as well as four local universities and colleges to support student research and internships, and partners with the West Virginia Department of Education for its statewide curriculum. Brockman sees the mission to educate younger generations as crucial.
“They don’t teach history in the classrooms anymore,” he said. “We are putting everything online – the journals and everything. It’s important that they understand what happened to their relatives and ancestors during this period of time.”
The ADBC Museum is located at 945 Main St., Wellsburg, W.Va., and is free and open six days a week. For more information, visit philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us.