June 1942 arrived in Lucas County as June always does, full of summer's promise --- but this also was the month, 80 years ago, when it started to become clear that World War II would exact a considerable toll, even in small and remote places like the south of Iowa. Before all was said and done, about 50 of the county's young would die.
The front page of the June 9 Chariton Leader begins to tell that story with three brief items consolidated under one headline, "Andy Knapp is Missing in Action."
Sgt. Knapp (left), a 1938 graduate of Chariton High School, was the first Lucas Countyan to die in that war, a dubious distinction that would not become evident until the war was over. Missing in action, too, the other items reported, were young men with connections to Lucas County but officially resident elsewhere --- Don Donaldson of Des Moines and George E. Morgan of Creston.
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Here's how The Leader reported Andy's status as "missing in action" ---
Andy Knapp, 24, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Knapp of Chariton has been reported as "missing in action" by the war department at Washington, D.C. Word was received by his parents last week.
Knapp is in the Army Air Corps and his parents last heard from him last Nov. 6 when he was in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was an Air Corps mechanic.
The message from the war department said that he was serving in the Philippines and that pending the obtaining of a list of prisoners and casualties from the Japanese government that he has been listed as "missing in action."
Knapp enlisted in October, 1940, and received his training at the Army school at Rantoul, Ill.
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I've written here before about Sgt. Knapp --- See "In honor of Sgt. Andy Knapp, 1918-1942" --- and here's an excerpt from that earlier post:
Upon completion of his training as an aircraft mechanic, Andy was assigned to the 21st Pursuit Squadron and deployed to Hamilton Field, California. He left California on Oct. 31/Nov. 1, 1941, with the 21st Squadron, bound for the Philippines, where the squadron had been assigned to the 24th Pursuit Group. His family heard from him the last time in a letter dated Nov. 9, 1941, posted during a stop in Hawaii.
It is almost impossible in the 21st century to comprehend the situation and conditions in the Philippines after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, as Imperial Japanese forces moved to take the islands.
Headquartered initially at Clark Field, the 24th Pursuit Group was ordered on Dec. 24, 1941, to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula and eventually to Bataan Airfield. During the days and weeks that followed, the 24th and all of its squadrons were destroyed. Survivors, perhaps including Andy, joined infantrymen to fight a deadly, losing battle to defend the peninsula.
On April 9, 1942, the United States surrendered Bataan. Corregidor fell a month later, on May 6. Andy was among an estimated 60,000-80,000 Filipino and American Prisoners of War forced in what now is known as the Bataan Death March to walk up the Bataan peninsula to a railhead at San Fernando, Pampanga, where they were jammed into freight cars and hauled northwest before being forced to walk the final miles to prisoner of war camps. Thousands died.
Andy reached Camp O'Donnell at some point during May of 1942, starving, weak and apparently desperately ill. There was a hospital in the camp and a few surviving medics, but there was no food, no clean water and no medicine. The dying were taken there. Andy most likely was among them. He died on or about June 2, 1942, the U.S. Military eventually determined. Both dysentery and malaria are given as causes in various records. It may have been both. He was buried in the camp cemetery.
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In the aftermath of the war, those buried in the Camp O'Donnell cemetery, including Andy, were disinterred, identified and reinterred at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in metro Manila, within the boundaries of the former Fort William McKinley. And there he remains, surrounded by comrades but far from home.
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PFC George E. Morgan's connection to Lucas County is remote --- his father, the Rev. George Moore Morgan, had served as rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Chariton before accepting a call to St. Paul's Church in Bad Axe, Michigan, during March of 1941. But his burial place in the Manilla American Cemetery is near Andy's.
George, trained as a mail clerk, was assigned to the Medical Detachment, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, and was serving in the Field Hospital Medical Corps on Bataan when captured by the Japanese during April of 1942.
George survived the Bataan Death March and captivity at Camp O'Donnell, but died on Oct. 21, 1942, of dysentery at Cabanatuan POW Camp No. 1.
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Don Donaldson, whose parents were R.S. "Jack" and Pansy Donaldson, was living in Des Moines with his mother and her second husband, James Burgett, when he dropped out of Lincoln High School and enlisted at age 17 in the U.S. Navy.
Although reported initially as missing in action, his parents learned as the war progressed that their son had been aboard the U.S.S. Edsall when it went down with all hands on March 1, 1942, during an attack by Japanese forces some 200 miles east of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.
Don is commemorated on the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery and on his mother's tombstone in the Chariton Cemetery, which serves as his cenotaph. More information about Don and the Edsall is available in this post, entitled "The valor of Don Donaldson and the men of the Edsall."
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