Seaman 2nd Class Charles Terrell Thomas was held as a prisoner of war during WWII for practically the entire length of the war!

Wow ! A Complete Surprise

As a kid growing up I had always heard my grandfather speak of my Uncle Terrell, and that he had died when a hospital got bombed in 1942 on the island of Java. He had the telegram from the war department, the military certificate of death and the purple heart medal they sent him. And that was that.

He was always a mystery to me, all my life I've never even seen a photograph of him. He was my mothers brother and she came from a very poor family in Warrior, Alabama. They lived in a tiny wood house with a hard packed dirt floor, mom was born at home as back then going to the hospital was far too expensive. This was in the middle of the great depression and grandpaw was a coal miner and money was scarce. So getting a photo made was an absolutely unnecessary expense.

Uncle Terrell was a twin... Earl and Terrell, but in their deeply southern accent the names sounded the same. And knowing what my Uncle Earl looked like I always figured Terrell must have looked the same. This was a hard family that lived a very hard life. My moms other brother Dalton had been in the Army in WWII and had fought from D Day in the Invasion of Normandy all the way till the very end of the war and then had come home and five days later shot a man and ended up spending the rest of his life in prison. He even escaped prison twice and came to visit us.

I got my first automobile, a 1961 Chevy Impala convertible, given to me by Uncle Dalton when they captured him and sent him back. He gave it to me even though I was not even old enough to drive it! But I kept it and eventually did drive that car for years. Once when I had just turned 16 and got my drivers license we were at a family reunion, the huge ones we used to do in the south with a couple hundred people and loads of food laid out across many tables in the back yard of a very modest but large farm out in Eclectic, Alabama.

1961 Impala
My grandfather asked me to take him for a ride to visit an old friend of his that was not too far away. We drove about 20 miles into the deep country till we came to a old run down wooden church, and this was Sunday afternoon so there was a few horse buggies and a couple of old trucks in the lot by the chruch, with a small graveyard and its modest tombstones with only 30 or so graves. You could here the people singing in the church, no piano or organ, just their voices, singing out of harmony but still hauntingly beautiful as it drifted across the cemetery.

I asked my grandpaw "where's your friend?" as we got out of the car and walked to one of the old graves in the corner of the cemetery. He said he was right there and pointed to a old grave with barely a marker, no name on it. He said "this was my best friend and I miss him so". He knelt for a while, I didn't say anything but just stood there listening to the woeful music coming from the church.

After a while he got up and we got back in the car and started over to the reunion. Grandpaw didn't say anything, so after a while I asked what had happened to his friend back then. He replied, "back in 1921, I got into an argument with him in a bar and shot him dead" I was gobsmacked! I had never heard the story at all. When we got back to the reunion I asked mom and she said yes, "that is why he doesn't touch a drop alcohol and hates it so!" He was never charged for it, no prosecution or anything, this was so far into the back country that there were no police to speak of and when I tried to find out more mom told me to stop, saying it's something they just don't speak of.

Wow.... so as I said this family was as southern and as hardscrabble as they come. As a side note, grandpaw died in the late 1960's from what they call "black lung disease" from working many years in the coal mines.

Back to the story of Uncle Terrell.

WWII Purple Heart & Certificate

Uncle Terrell's disappearance was more of enigma that brought little speculation. After all, grandpaw had the Purple Heart and the statement from the war department saying he had died in the hospital. But I was always curious about that. I wanted to know the whole story, so when search engines became available online back in the 90's, every once in a while I would type in his name to see what would come up. Just to see if I could find his war records.

Fast forward to just a few months ago, I tried again, and bingo! I found something that really was completely different that my family has always believed. He did not die in a hospital at the beginning of the war after all!

The Real Story

It is interesting to note that the reason the records took so long to make it online is because after they were cleared to be released, the U.S. National Archives had to hire a company to come in and literally create a new system that could "read" the old punch cards which the original information was stored on back in the late 1940's. Punch cards were the cutting edge technology back then. Wow again. This link is to the very first listing I found of his war records:
http://valor.militarytimes.com/recipient.php?recipientid=304558

Apparently the story was far from what we had believed all this time! Uncle Terrell had actually been captured by the Japanese Army in March of 1942 and was held in a POW camp on the Island of Java until right before the war ended. After surviving all those years in a jungle POW camp he died only a couple months before the POW camp was liberated! And it took the US Navy another few years to sort through the camp records before they realized this.

And then it took 50 years before they made the reports public! And now we could access his war records. But what happened to him? How did he get captured on an island when he was in the Navy, stationed on a ship at sea?

We really wanted to know now... although his parents and all his brothers and sisters had all passed away, including his youngest sister, my mom, we still wanted to know. So the search was on to find out more. Soon enough we found this site listing as well: http://www.ww2pow.info/index.php?page=directory&rec=33842

This site made mention of the camp he was held in; Java Pow Camps D X Y Batavia Java 6 107 - and this bit of information led to yet another site with a bit more detailed info about the camps and how they were run; http://wwii-pow-camps.mooseroots.com/l/119/Java-Camps-D-X-Y

For instance this bit of information I found really interesting: "The full name of this camp is Java POW Camps D.X.Y. (Batavia) Java 6-107, and it was controlled by Imperial Japan. The National Archives has records for 224 Allied prisoners held here, 129 of whom were liberated, and 75 of whom did not survive their captivity. 50 died in camp, 24 were shot escaping."

Prisoner of War Medal - WWII

My Cousin the Sleuth

After this information was made available, my cousin actually went to Washington DC to visit the archives and delved deeper into this. We are all completely intrigued that he survived all those years without anyone knowing about it. And all attempts to track down any of the 129 surviving prisoners were complete dead ends, any of them would have to be past 100 years old now.

So from here I will let my cousin speak, this is what she wrote about the experience:

Uncle Terrell

On March 1, 1942 SC1 Charles Terrell Thomas was declared missing in action by the United States Navy. He was never found. His disappearance was legendary, at least in my family. Ask any relative, and you will get a different answer about what happened to Charles Terrell, known as Terrell. “He was in Pearl Harbor.” “He was on a boat and it blew up.” “He fell off something.”

Moore’s Marauders,

74 years after World War II, there are 78,000 U.S servicemen still missing in action. According to Ken Moore, founder of Moore’s Marauders, a nonprofit MIA search and recovery organization, the U.S government maintains there are about 35,000 MIA remains that are still recoverable. Moore, whose own uncle was MIA during World War II, considers it a personal mission to recover the servicemen who dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom. The search and recovery service is provided to veterans’ families free of charge, and Moore’s world class team consists of former military commanders, doctors, scientists, pilots and experts in everything from agriculture to explosives.

Finding someone who has been missing for 70 years isn’t easy, especially if you don’t really know where to start. Before contacting the Marauders, I decided to conduct my own investigation and gather as much information as possible. With a little internet sleuthing, I discovered Terrell was listed as a POW on the island of Java in Indonesia. The trail ended there. Prisoner camps corresponded to numbers denoting camp locations throughout Java, but there was no number next to Terrell’s name. Next, I contacted the National Personnel Records Center. Located in St. Louis, Missouri, the center is the repository of millions of military personnel records from the 20th century. The records indicated that Terrell’s status was changed from MIA to presumed dead after the war. No further information was noted or included. Another dead end.

Moore’s personal journey to piece together what happened to his uncle Billy during World War Two spanned 30 years and multiple continents. In 1999, Moore and his group recovered wreckage from his uncle’s B-29 bomber, The Life of Riley, off the coast of the Mariana Islands. Today, the team is busy fundraising and conducting research trips around the world to piece together the stories of MIA’s. Some of the areas of focus include the Tinian Islands, from which the Enola Gay flew, parts of China where Japanese labor camps existed and the areas surrounding the 100 mile Bataan Death March.

When I contacted Moore, he mentioned that time was of the essence in finding MIA’s. With each passing day, the hope of collaborating research theories with eye witness accounts diminishes a little more. The Marauders network is vast, especially in the Pacific Islands, and after emailing over copies of documents and photographs I had of Terrell, my search request entered the queue.

National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Then I made one last attempt to find some answers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Anyone with a picture I.D and a defined research topic can access the National Archives’ billions of original documents. It is powerful and a bit frightening to hold the original (the National Archives doesn’t make copies) record of history in one’s own hands. After requesting the deck logs of the ship Terrell was stationed on, I made a discovery that held the key to the mystery. Deck logs, which contain records of ship activity, are amazingly thorough. Terrell had been sick on and off for several months and was transferred to a Dutch military hospital in Western Java in February 1941. The USS John D. Edwards, the ship Terrell was stationed on, remained docked in Java until The Battle of The Java Sea in late February. Deck logs show the ship made a stealthy escape to Australia on February 28th, 1941. The next day, Japanese forces invaded the island of Java.

So What Really Happened?

The story ends here, or perhaps this is where it really begins. What happened on that island? Records show it took Japanese forces two days to reach the area where the Dutch hospital was located. Well before then Charles, who wasn’t mortally ill or wounded, would have realized that his ship had left without him. Did he attempt to escape to the mountains only to find Japanese sympathizers? Did he stay and fight? POW camps on the island were emptied, and prisoners endured the Bataan Death March to Japanese work camps, but there are no records of what happened to the servicemen in the hospital.

My family has one letter written by Terrell during his military service. In it, he describes the beauty of the Philippines and the excitement of visiting exotic locales. For a poor Alabama boy, the military was the greatest escape. Steady pay and three meals a day was far better than most were getting at home. In fact, one of the top reasons young men from Alabama failed their military physicals was weight requirements. They didn’t weigh enough, the result of years of malnourishment.

As Moore said, time is the enemy here. Each day that passes, the remaining veterans from World War II, those who can recall the battles and the horrors, the history, are slipping away. Maybe my family and I will never know what happened to Terrell. Maybe I’m not supposed to know. But that won’t stop me from looking.

The end

________________

That is a good bit of research and we are all grateful to her for doing it. It is sad, but we, like many thousands of families across the planet, will never know what really happened.

Here is a link to the official website about his ship: http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/216.htm

In Closing

We have some closure but still many gaps remain, one can only imagine the escape into the jungle, hiding out until captured? Enduring the infamous Bataan Death March. To me at least, all of this is amazing.

Here is a link to the History Channel site about the march:http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bataan-death-march

That is the story. Not really one to enjoy but truly an amazing bit of personal history. We all have, or know someone that had a family member that suffered in that huge global war. A war that is slowing being eroded away from our memory. For example, an airport I used to fly out in the 90's used to have over 200 WWII pilots that were part of the flying community.

Every-Single-One is now gone, passed on. There are fewer and fewer men and women who fought and served in WWII, within just a few short years they will all be gone.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. It is not my usual subject matter but I really felt like sharing it.

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