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SALT LAKE CITY -- Since World War I, more than 142,000 Americans have been captured and held as prisoners of war. They paid a dear price for our freedoms.
Thursday, the Department of Veterans Affairs honored some those Utah POWs as part of Former POW Recognition Day.
In early 1943, American B-17 bombers flew deep into Germany on bombing runs. Young Charles Thompson of Spring City, Utah, was a co-pilot on his first mission. He was shot down and captured, then hauled off to a prison camp.
"I spent 21 and a half months in a prisoner of war camp. I broke a leg when I landed," Thompson recalled.
So, he started off in a prison hospital. At times, he worried about his health but always believed he was coming home.
"I knew it was going to end; and I knew, if it was possible, I would be alive," Thompson said.
The VA saluted about 40 former POWs. It honors them each year on this date: April 9.
It was April 9, 1942, when starving and exhausted U.S. forces at Bataan in the Philippines surrendered to the invading Japanese during World War II. Seventy-five thousand American and Filipino troops were forced to march 70 miles to a POW camp -- an infamous trek that became known as the "Bataan Death March." More than 600 American soldiers died from maltreatment and murder; the rest faced years of brutal captivity.
Since World War I, more than 142,000 Americans, including 85 women, have been captured and interned as POWs. Not included in this figure are nearly 93,000 Americans who were lost or never recovered. -U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs
"It makes you appreciate your life more, the freedoms we have here," said Lynn Beens. "That's one thing people don't understand."
Beens, of Layton, was an Air Force navigator in the Vietnam War. He was shot down over Hanoi and held captive 99 days, part of that time spent in the notorious Hanoi Hilton.
Beens hopes he is one of Utah's last POWs.
"That's a hope -- that we don't have any more in the future," he said. "The last couple wars we haven't had that much, so that kind of would be a way to go, to not have any more."
More than 90 percent of living former POWs were interned during World War II. American veterans of that war are now dying at a rate of 1,500 each day.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
